December 8th- Home

I am sitting in my chair, in my apartment in Nashville. I am not sure if it’s a more surreal feeling to be back here, or to think of where I’ve been. My description of this travel day will come off as pretty steril and uninteresting… mainly because it was, and I am too tired to make it sound interesting.

11:30 PM-  Our French family took Corey and I to the airport in Geneva

6:30 AM- We leave the airport on our flight to Madrid

12:00 PM- we leave for our 10 hour flight to Miami

4:00 PM- our 10 hour flight lands in Miami

8:30 PM- our flight leaves for Nashville

10:00PM- our flight lands

11:30PM- I post this.

 

December 7th- France?

Even though there is one more day of flying, this is effectively the last day of my Europe trip with Corey Horn. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the end being here. Understandably it’s a mixed emotion.

I love traveling like this, I love the experiences, and the excitement of doing something that not everyone gets to do. I’ve grown so much, and learned so much from these other cultures. At the same time, we have seen these countries so fast, and done so much in the short amount of time we’ve had, that I am almost ready to put an end to this trip. I feel like if I can’t look at the trip in my memory as a completed whole experience, it will start to blur together. I guess that’s when I need to look back and read all of these posts.

It’s amazing to me, thinking back on the events of the past month, how this trip has varied from place to place. It hasn’t just varied with cultures and food and language, but even in the type of traveling that we’ve been doing. Early on we had friends in these countries and it was easy to stay with them. The plans were solid and we were lucky to have great guides that we could rely on.  As the trip has gone on we’ve gone from staying with friends, to staying in hotels, to not knowing where we would end up on a given night, and now staying with complete strangers in a country we did not even intend to visit in the first place.  It feels like we’ve experienced everything from  being pampered to roughing it (in a very soft sense of the word).  The times when we’ve been on our own have been exciting, and the times when we’ve been with friends to lead us have been great too. It’s been interesting to use logic in foreign countries to figure out where to go, what to see, where to stay, and what to eat. As long as we’ve always assumed there would be a solution, we’ve always found one.

The biggest thing I can take away from this entire trip is something that I’ve always believed deep down.  It seems to me that even though the countries are different, the politicks are different, the food is different, and the  history is different, the human race as a whole remains the same. No matter where you are or what language you are speaking, we all have the same emotions, we all have the same fear and tragedies and the same joy and victories. It makes it somewhat less intimidating when you are asking a stranger for help, not knowing how they feel about long haired Americans.

The past 48 hours have been very interesting. We ended up in Geneva, and had no where to stay. Hotels here are extremely expensive there, and were definitely out of our price range.  We ended up using Couch Surfing to get in contact with an amazing family living just over the boarder in France. They speak some english, and after talking with some difficulty on Skype while sitting in Starbucks they agreed to very graciously drive 30 minutes to pick us up. The kindness of people is so amazing to me.

This last stop of the trip has certainly not been what I expected. We thought we would be exploring a city in Switzerland, but we find ourselves spending time with a French family in the country. It’s raining steadily, so I am very grateful.

Tomorrow morning at 4:30AM we will be at the airport ready to fly back to Nashville.

 

December 6th- Geneva

This has been a wild ride of a day. The cultures are blurring together, I don’t know what language I’m supposed to be trying to understand, and the random collection of bills and coins seem more and more confusing, and less and less valuable.

I am writing this from a Starbucks in the middle of a shopping center in Geneva, Switzerland. However, I started the day in Rome, Italy. My traveling mate Corey and I woke up pretty early today to get a good start on this hectic day. We got breakfast at our strange hotel we were staying at. A nice Italian woman made us coffee and we helped ourselves to the assortment of fruit and baked items. It was good, but I do now understand that it’s hard to satisfy a true American appetite.  We then walked about 5K back to the Vatican. We had been around the outside of this area yesterday, but due to the weather and the lines to get in we had decided to save it for today.  This time the weather was amazing, and since we went so early the lines had disappeared.

I have seen some amazing things in my life, but the scale of this site took me greatly by surprise. The ability for one city, one government to build something of this magnitude and extravagance almost made me feel almost nauseous. It’s something I can barely wrap my mind around, let alone describe, so I will try to do it some justice with the pictures that follow.

After the Vatican we realized that time was running very short to make our flight to Geneva. We hopped on busses, hopped off busses, hopped on our train, and finally made it to our gate in time. Somewhere in there we found 20 minutes to have the best Italian fettechini alfredo of my life at a really cool sit down place.

On to Geneva. There is very little plan for this part of the trip. Any site we see will be amazing, but right now on this rainy night the biggest question on our minds is where we are staying.  We went to the Starbucks I’m writing this from to get internet, and I had to ask the cashier what type of money was used here. This is all seeming so strange, but I am very happy to be doing it.