Tag Archives: backpacking

Paris, France: Catacombs

Today I wake up really early.  I go to McDonalds for breakfast and wifi.  One of the breakfast options is a croissant and coffee.  This is what I want.  This is what I try to order.  No one behind the counter seemed to understand me.  Pointing gets me nowhere.  I get annoyed and leave.  Around the corner is a Quick, which is like McDonalds only not like McDonalds.  I get a coffee and croissant no problem here.  They advertise WiFi.  Guess what, it doesn’t work.  The WiFi.  Guess what else?  I spilled my entire coffee all over myself.  I want to cry, I really do.  I go back to my room and decide that if this is what today is going to be like, then I am not going to try a combo of Versailles and Catacombs.   I will go just to the Catacombs to be safe.  Good thing I did since the line was way over two hours.

I walk inside and slip twice.  The first time was no big deal.  The second time, I now fear that the rest of my time in here will be me trying to not fall.   The third time I slipped, I went to grab the wall to stop myself.  Only now, we are at the skulls.  So I am grabbing human skulls and bones to balance myself, it was awful.

Later on, we get to where water is dripping and the floor is now wet.  I start walking like a 397 year old woman because I am deathly afraid of falling.

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Part One: Flight of Death into Friends and Beer and Happy

April 25, 2013 – The day we all have been waiting for.  The day I leave for Europe!!  I had a typical bad day at work, made even worse by it being “Bring Your Kids to Work Day”  Finally the day is over and I am FREEEEEEEEEE!!!!  Europe here I come!!

Well it seems that in addition to being “Bring Your Kids to Work Day”, it is also “Bring Your Kids to Belgium Day”

Whenever I book a flight, I pick my seat.  Last row, window seat on the right side of the plane.  Last row because it gives you the best chance of having a row to yourself.  Window seat because i can not breathe on planes.  Having the window next to me is psychosomatic and makes me feel like I have more oxygen.  Right side because that’s the way I lean when I fall asleep sitting up.

Tonight I get on the plane.  I am still at the door and I can hear the SCREAMING kid.  SCREAMING.  Now let me stop and explain a bit here.  Usually when someone talks about a screaming kid on a plane, it’s about a kid having a meltdown and just scream crying.  That was not what this one was doing.  It seemed to have having the worlds LOUDEST conversation with itself in a language only it spoke.  Lots of “BEEEEEEEEEEE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP” just nonstop.

I make my way to the last row for my seat and this SCREAMING kid is in my seat.  Not in my row, not next to my seat, but IN MY SEAT.  Screaming away IN MY SEAT.  Not only that, but it looks like it is in for the long haul.  It is standing on my seat, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP-ing away, with all its stuff all over the place.   All over my seat, the floor, the seat back pocket.  It has a bag under the seat in front of it.  I recheck my boarding pass because surely I am at the wrong seat?  I’m not.  So my next logical thought is that this thing is in the wrong seat.  I try telling it that it’s in my seat and all I get back is “BEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP”    Finally, the father surfaces and asks me to switch to a middle row aisle seat.  Oh Hell no.  Don’t tell me you got on the plane and completely unpacked your kid in my seat, just expecting I would agree to switch because I won’t.  I tell him no, I need the window or else I will vomit.

So the kid is then moved to the available aisle seat next to mine. This is an enormous production since it had so much stuff unpacked and all over the freaking place.   Even though we are at the back of the plane, there are still people trying to get by so now we have a traffic jam.  The kid is still screaming.  Never once did its father try to get it to be quiet.  Not once.  Finally its out of my way and I am free to take my seat so I do.

I get settled.  Get my stuff out. Notebook, pen, gum, MP3 player, headphones.  I now have everything in the back seat pocket, I am ready to go. Now that I am all settled, this guy now goes all over the plane trying to find someone to give up their window seat to me, so that I can move and still have a window seat.  Then this SCREAMING kid can have my seat and the new person can take the middle aisle seat.  He finds someone.  I am tempted to still say no.  I never actually said I would move if he found me a new window seat.  Everything about this is obnoxious.

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Three Weeks Until Euro Extravaganza!

This morning I got up for work.  My first thought was “THREE WEEKS UNTIL VACATION!!!!”.  While getting my morning iced coffee out of the refrigerator, I noticed a fortune cookie that was leftover from last weekend.  I opened it and got THIS:

goningYes misspelled fortune cookie, yes I am.

My trip is so soon and I am still not ready.  Today I have decided to redo my itinerary again.  This is all because I can not find out if the Nis, Serbia bus station has luggage lockers. I had planned to stop there for a few hours between Sarajevo and Sofia.   If i take a chance and leave my trip the way its been cemented in for weeks now, I may find myself carrying my bag around sightseeing.  The internet tells me nothing.  So here I am right now taking a break from going  nutso and redoing my itinerary to switch out the “stop there for a few hours” part with “spend one night in Nis”.  Then I have to find a night in Bulgaria to give up so that I have a night to spend there.  I really need to consider booking more flexible trips, where I don’t insist upon seeing so much at one shot, so that I do have spare days.  But I don’t want to, because I want to see every inch of planet earth right NOW.

So my updated upcoming travels are now:

April 26 – May 20 – Europe

May 22 – May 27 – Seattle, WA

May 29 – June 3 – Austin, TX

June 6 – June 9 – combo of Chicago and Toronto.

I am the opposite of a fan of my job.  But I will admit that I am in love with both the amount of vacation time I get, as well as the fact that they let me take it all in a row like this.  Most places would not.

 

 

First Time Travel to Europe

I have always wanted to go to Europe.  Even before I really understood what that meant.

Two years ago, I had this conversation with a friend:

Me: I want to go to Russia

Her:  Me too!  Where do you want to go?

Me:  Uhhhhhhh, Russia?

Her: I want to go to Moscow, St.  Petersburg and ride the Trans Siberian railway.

OH.  I see what you mean.  You don’t just pick a country, you pick destinations within a country.  I was so not even close to being well traveled outside of America that even that had never occurred to me.

I had always wanted to see the world, but had a million different reasons that were stopping me.  I’m scared to go alone, I can’t afford it, I’d rather take an easy vacation instead…and so on.

Then it happened.  I was staring down the barrel of age 40. I was only two years away from the age my mother was when she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually took her life.   I started panicking that I had done nothing in life that I had ever truly dreamed about.   In a way it was kind of like a midlife crisis.  Although as a good friend of mine once told me it’s not because “mid life crisises are for boring people who wake up one day and realize they are boring.  You just woke up one day and decided to be even more interesting”.  Either way, its time to go.

There are so many ways to travel in Europe.  I don’t mean just transport options, although that exists as well. I mean the whole “Where do I go?!?” and so on.  There’s so much to see in this world, how can you possibly narrow it down to ONE destination??

It can be completely overwhelming, which is another reason I had put it off for so long.  There are a million different ways to pick your destination.  How did I pick my first?

One night I was in Las Vegas, for my annual Christmas trip.  Before going to bed one night, I saw a Facebook event invite for one of my favorite bands (Grey Area, if you must know), who were going to be playing Europe for the first time, in Belgium.   I said “if I win enough to buy a plane ticket, I am going”.  Well……the next morning……

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I was completely shocked.  I now  had no reason to not go.  I could not talk myself out of it be Continue reading