** Sorry about any pronoun-based confusion, but we're jointly writing these entries and the author often changes at random intervals, so deal with it**
For those of you who didn’t know, Rachel and I decided this past November to take a semester off from school, and go on a trip to Europe. For funzies. And we decided to ship off in the coming spring. Truly, we had this huge romanticized notion of how this trip would work: we had planned on disembarking on a cargo ship from Port Everglades in late January or early February, staying in Europe for like four months and traveling to absolutely ever country that slightly struck our fancy, hitchhiking and riding our new (or lovingly used) European motorcycles through incredibly picturesque landscapes, heading from the southwest to as far east as we could go without difficult visa-situations and then going up north to return to the east, and hopping back on the next ship heading somewhere across the Atlantic and eventually ending up back in the States, via Costa Rica or Cuba, if we could talk our way into (and out of) the country. The actual trip hasn’t actually turned out like that, but it’s in no way worse… though a motorcycle would be pretty sweet. Soooo, this was the picture we painted for our parents of what we had decided to do with our spring semester instead of continuing our studies right away. We broke the news to our folks Thanksgiving weekend, hoping for the best. Rachel’s were pretty accepting, whereas mine went from disbelief to ardent disagreement (mostly about the timing). But eventually, we (semi)-convinced them that the timing would work out and that spring was the best option (partially because there would be less tourists, partially because it was better for some people we knew who said they could host or hire us while abroad, and partially because it had seemed that it would be easier to take the classes in summer at this time in our college career, rather than later when our courses would not be available in the summer, and we would need to be thinking of internships and jobs and such. Also, we were really excited to go and didn’t really want to wait.)
Waiting until the last minute, as finals week of fall semester drew to a close, we decided we were really going to go, cancelled our dorm contracts for the spring, and dropped all the classes we had registered for. As we began planning, we quickly realized that a lot of our plans were simply impossible to bring to realization. So, we opted for two months at home working, bought plane tickets (leaving for Madrid on March 4th and leaving from Dublin June 10th) instead of working through the difficult cargo ship idea, which was far more expensive than it seemed it should be, decided (at Ryan’s request) to stick to mostly Western European countries (deciding to still follow the east-north-west pattern of early more idealized plans: beginning in Spain, traveling through Southern France to Switzerland and Northern Italy, making our way north through Austria to Munich and a bit east to Prague, back west to Denmark, the Netherlands-of course-and Belgium, mozying back through France to visit Paris and cross the Channel to the UK to work in London and then to Ireland to visit the ghosts of ancient castles and find faeries whilst on horseback) and waiting to buy motorcycles for our return. But the general plan for our European journey, once we got there, remained the same: we found some work through a couple organizations: WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) and WorkAway (both of these organizations provide a place for hosts to contact volunteers who will work on their farm, at their bed and breakfast, or at their forestry school, etc., in exchange for room and board and amazing food) and relied on some of Rachel’s European Yale contacts for some paying work. We had also hoped to do some couchsurfing, though nobody seems to want to host people who have yet to try it before, but it’s still a possibility.
So, that’s where we are. We had meant to start writing and posting this blog as soon as we left, but faulty internet connections and breathtaking sights were set against us. As it stands, we are posting our first entry the 10th of April (we’ve been in Europe for over a month now) at an internet point in Perugia, Italy (we’ve already traveled through Spain, the South of France and parts of northwest and central Italy). Bon voyage!
(Visual representation of how awesome our trip is)