So here is my travel journal from my backpacking trip to Europe. It's more involved than my day log stuff that's already been up the site. There has been some complaining (you know who you are) that my daylog was rather boring and that it focused too much on the details of transportation. I can't promise that this is less boring, but's there's certainly a hell of lot more of it. Occasional parts of the journal have been omitted to protect the (not-so)innocent. These parts really weren't that common, but hey - use your imagination. Keep in mind that this is a journal and things like punctuation, sentence structure, paragraph breaks, grammar, and spelling may or may not been a part of the writing process. Not to mention my almost criminal use of parenthesis. Like my pictures, the writing is quite erratic as far as consistency of content. The journal style kind of mutates over the course of the trip. Read at your own risk.
 4/28 Cincinnati 4/30 Paris 5/02 Paris 5/03 Paris 5/04 Bayeux 5/06 Toulouse 5/07 Barcelona 5/08 Barcelona 5/09 Madrid 5/11 Salamanca 5/12 Salamanca 5/13 Barcelona 5/14 Portbou 5/15 Narbonne 5/17 Nice 5/18 Venice 5/20 Naples 5/21 Rome 5/22 Rome 5/24 Florence 5/25 La Spezia 5/26 Lucerne 5/29 Interlaken 5/30 Interlaken 6/03 Amsterdam 6/04 London 6/06 Salisbury 6/09 Nottingham 6/11 Edinburgh 6/13 Kyleakin 6/15 Dublin 6/17 Dublin 6/23 Hamburg 6/27 Brussels 6/29 Berlin 7/01 Prague 7/02 Munich 7/03 Munich |
5/6 - Toulouse, France I'm not actually staying in Toulouse, it just happens to be the train station I'm in at the moment, but I'll get to that later. I spent the last 2 days in Bayeux, which was nice and relaxing(a nice change from Paris). My intention was to go see the d-day beaches on Sunday but since the buses don't run on sundays, I didn't go until Monday. So I spend the day wandering around with this girl named Amy  who was in a similar predicament. We went and saw the Bayeux tapestry, which is 70 meters long, tells the story of William the Conqueror's invasion of England, and is spectacularly boring. Fortunately Museums in Bayeux are free on the first sunday of every month, and this was one such sunday. Still, the audio guide detailing the tapestry was cheesy enough to be highly entertaining. The d-day museum was much more interesting, even though it's fairly small, we spent almost three hours there. In addition to weapons, tanks, and other war memorabilia, they had thousands of newspaper clippings in various languages which were very entertaining. I spent the rest of the evening hanging out at the hostel and did laundry. On Monday (yesterday) I missed breakfast because I got up at about 10 and they'd apparently stopped serving breakfast even though they served until at least 10:30 the day before (keep in mind there are no posted hours). Anyway, I went to Omaha beach and the American cemetery (albeit briefly, the bus schedule is quite screwy). Although there wasn't really much to see there (we didn't get to Pont du Hoc, where you see bunkers and craters), it was still thought provoking. Just thinking about being either side of the invasion is unsettling. It made me really think about the people actually dying on the battlefield as opposed to just politics and strategy of the war. Scary stuff. Anyway, after that we (still hanging out with Amy) headed off to Paris, me to get my Eurail pass from Y&H and her to catch a train to Copenhagen. After getting my Eurail pass I made a mad dash to the train station in attempt to catch the overnight train to Barcelona, which I missed of course. So I opted for a set of connecting trains which would get me there in the early afternoon. I tried to get a sleeping car but they only took cash for that and all the atms in the train station were out of service (same problem when I got to Toulouse). This could prove to be a problem since have only about 7 Euros in cash. I missed my connecting train on purpose because I was still trying to get a hostel reservation in Barcelona. I finally found one, so I caught the next train, which I'm on right now. I'm really looking forward to Spain, I was beginning to get tired of France. The only problem is that the week in France has screwed up my spanish pronunciation. I seem to be a sponge for accents, I've been talking to a lot of canadians lately, and I caught myself saying words like 'about' in a canadian accent completely unintentionally. Who knows what I'll sound like at the end of the trip.
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