It’s 7:25PM, but my brain thinks it’s about midnight. I’m kind of fuzzy on what day it is (Thursday according to my calendar) and I’ve already managed to develop blisters from all of the walking. It’s hot as all heck and I seem to be insatiably thirsty, but it’s awesome so far!

Unfortunately, I don’t have a phone at the moment. I’ve poked around in various shops but all of the cheap phones don’t have SIM cards. I’m already starting to miss my iPhone. I’ve gone to pull it out a few times and then realized that I couldn’t use it. Ah withdrawal…

The good news is: I’m not completely Spanish illiterate! Yay! I’ve managed to survive the last 11 hours without too many problems (though trying to sort out the cell phone logistics was pretty interesting. Note to Spanish teachers everywhere: teach some practical things like cell phone terminology how to tell your hostel keeper that you canceled your second night but would like to apply that night’s downpayment to tonight’s stay because you canceled the second night with enough notice to receive your downpayment back.) It also turns out that I’ve completely forgotten most conjugations for tenses other than the present. There are a few frequently used ones that have stuck in my head, but for the most part it’s present tense all the way. I’m just glad that when I do get a full sentence out, it doesn’t contain too many uhs and ums and I don’t sound like a classroom-Spanish American. w00t.

So now we’re (we = me + Marquise, a friend from Cornell) hanging out in our hostel post-siesta and are trying to sort out what to do for dinner. My feet are telling me to eat the granola bar I have in my backpack and call it a night, but my more practical side is telling me to go get some tapas and sangria. Hopefully the sangria side will win that battle.

To those of you who were asking about my itinerary, that’s coming up soon. I worked it out on Tuesday (finally) so it’s only in pencil on a piece of paper folded up in my backpack, but when I have the attention span to transcribe it I will. I can tell you that my next 3 stops will be Barcelona (tomorrow evening, overnight train), Copenhagen (super cheap airfare from Barcelona. Win.), and then Palermo in Sicily (also by super cheap airfare). After that I think I’m headed to Venice to begin the nearly one-month long tour of Italy I’ve mapped out hitting the likes of Rome, Naples, Capri, Pompeii, Florence, Cinque Terre, and Pisa. Who knows what else will fit in there. Then there’s the entire month of July and a few days in August. I’ll spell those out later.

And, I’m sure the next question will be: “But Jenn! Where are all of the photos!” Well, they’re coming. I’m probably going to work on them on the train to Barcelona tomorrow night. I haven’t taken many yet because we were mostly just wandering around past the museums, but I think tomorrow will be a much better photo day.

So that’s all for now. I’m sure I’m forgetting things, but this is already longer than I anticipated! Have a good Thursday and I’ll be posting again soon with my itinerary!

Adios!

I think that’s when it hit her that I was actually serious about this trip and she proceeded to try her very hardest to convince me that going by myself was not a very good idea. I should find someone to go with me. I should stay in hotels. I should only go for a month. I should, I should, I should…

I know what the risks are and I don’t want to be talked out of going.

So I bought my ticket. Non-refundable. Open jaw into Madrid and out of Edinburgh. With 50 days to go (how about that nifty countdown I made up top there?) it was due time to set something in stone. Getting tickets gives me an exact window to plan my itinerary. I’ve had the tickets picked out for a while, but actually having a beginning and an end makes it so much more definite. This isn’t just a big idea anymore – it’s a reality.

The good news is that my flight to and from the US is the only part that’s set in stone. I really can do whatever I want for 63 days – I can go wherever I want for however long I want. As long as I make it to Edinburgh for my flight home on August 7th I’m good to go. Such freedom!

Next major steps include finding a hostel in Madrid and Barcelona and finding myself a backpack. I found one that fit like a glove yesterday but I’m worried that it’s slightly too big. I might order 2-3 bags and just return the ones I don’t like. That’s one of the downfalls of being in Ithaca (read: middle of nowhere) – there’s no place to actually try on a variety of bags. Ahh well. Online shopping to the rescue!

I have to say, it took a lot for me to cut out places like Glasgow and Stockholm, but when it came down to which places had to get the axe, I tried to pick groupings that would logically form into a future trip: a trip to Scandinavia, for instance, would let me cover Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki and a bunch of other places instead of just the first two. Same goes for the UK. The UK seems like the easiest trip to make somewhere down the line and dedicating an entire trip to the UK would let me cover the more rural parts of England and also fit in Wales and a lot more of Ireland.

So, with the exception of London, none of those places will be included in my trip this summer.

The second bit that helped me to make a lot of big decisions was my initial desire to spend a decent amount of time in Rome or at least somewhere in Italy. I’ve always been a “depth and breadth” kind of person – I like to do a lot of things, but I also like the ability to focus on one or two things to learn in better detail. This was the major turning point in my mapping: spending a large chunk of time in Italy would let me get in the depth part (and hopefully will teach me some Italian along the way) while still letting me see all but a few of the cities on my last map.

With this itinerary, I get the best of both worlds: I get to spend a significant amount of time in Italy (23 days: nearly half of my trip!), but having 14 days in Rome to redistribute if needed gives me a huge amount of flexibility for adding in some secondary cities (the orange dots) or spending an extra day or two in a city that I especially like. Not to mention, having so much time in Rome might open up the possibility of an overnight trip to a place like Split, Croatia which Matt has been trying to sell me on for some time now.

I haven’t yet decided if I want to fly into Madrid and out of London (as I envisioned it as I was mapping this out) or the other way around. I think being able to get settled first would be really helpful, so starting in a country whose language I speak seems logical to me. (I obviously speak English, but my Spanish isn’t too shabby either). There are arguments for either case, but I’ll think on it a couple of days and then hopefully will be able to buy my plane tickets!

So without further ado, here it is!: (click to view larger)

That posed a bit of a problem when it came to figuring out my itinerary. I had a list of cities that I rattled off, but I couldn’t really tell you how far apart they are or where a good number of them are in relation to each other. I needed a map. A good one. Off to the book store I went, but to my surprise, price tags were upwards of $20. $20! For a map! No thanks. That’s why we have the internet. After a little poking around I found a decent, grammar school geography class map that was perfect for my needs (like I said, I’m a bit geographically challenged). I needed a way to “stick pins” in the map so I could see if any logical patterns would emerge that would help me to decide where to fly in and where to fly out. Using my trusty list, I marked down the cities on the map in 3 colors: definitely, hopefully, and possibly. (And yes, I realize those aren’t colors).

With all of the points laid out before my eyes, it finally hit me: holy crap there’s no way I’m going to cover all of this. Soon followed by: why the hell is Athens so far away?! And Stockholm?! Come on now, Europe, how about some better planning? I wanted to sleep on it before I started to eliminate any cities. Visions of Dijkstra’s danced through my head. At least it was a break from those photography nightmares I’ve been having.

The next day I decided that it would make the most sense to see where the Eurail could take me. Maybe that would help in my decisions? This Eurail route map is a godsend. Especially the mini map in the bottom right corner with estimated travel times. Fantastic. I printed it out and started to connect the dots, cross out some lines, connect again, rinse and repeat.

Enter reality check.

With rough underestimates of how much travel time is needed and how many days I would stay in each place, I would need at least 90 days to complete the map with all of the points I put on it. That’s 30 days more than I actually have. And since I don’t want this to be a complete whirlwind tour, I’m going to have to prune back a lot. That means going from 32 to…well less than 25 but likely less than 20.

The likely candidates will be the outliers: Lisbon, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Budapest are first on the chopping block. I’d also like to maximize my time in Spain and Italy because that’s where I’d like to go most.

The good news is that I’ve made progress. The bad news is that I still have a long way to go, but I’m not complaining. If I’m having this much fun planning, I can only imagine how much fun the actual trip is going to be!