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.

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.

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.

Corey Horn and I spent the entire day walking all over Rome. Rome is a great city and the people here are wonderful.  We met up with our tour guide of sorts, her name was Jane, and she showed us all of the sites any awestruck American would want to see.

The thing that I could not wrap my mind around here was purely the age of the city.  In America I am so used to looking at a structure and thinking about the decade of the past century that it was built in. I can tell from the construction, the styling, and the technology. Here, it’s not even the realization that the structures are older than American structures. The buildings here are from movies, movies that my naive mind categorized as fiction. It’s incredible what humans have done in the years we’ve had.

I’m getting pretty fond of having this camera hung across my body… I will miss it when it’s not there to capture the beauty of the life around me… that means I’m uploading a freaking ton of pictures. The first few are  hopefully comforting pictures of our hotel in daylight.

The real adventure started when we landed. This is the first city we’ve been in where we haven’t really had friends  in the area to pick us up, or guide us to where we needed to be. We were completely on our own. It was a pretty simple task, however, to figure out where our hotel that we had booked was, and then choose the correct train to get us there. The train station at the airport seemed a bit shady, but we didn’t think too much of it. However, when we got off the train 40 minutes later at our stop, we found ourselves walking down small, poorly lit streets, catching many looks from the locals. Two long haired Americans don’t go completely unnoticed briskly walking down the street trying to read a map and carrying all of their possessions in comically large backpacks.

We navigated the streets well and made it through most of the bad areas. Our last turn was on to a deserted street not much larger than an ally. We knew this was where our hotel was, but it was definitely not marked with any easy to read sign.  We followed the address numbers, until we found our hotel’s address right next to a massive wooden door, at least 15 feet tall, marked only by a small buzzer system in the wall next to it. Reading the labels we saw that “Morpheus Hotel” had been written in pen on one of the buzzer slots. We rang the bell, and the door clicked open. After pushing the door further with a large creek, it opened into a deserted hall in what was clearly an extremely old building.

We rode the ancient caged in elevator to the fifth floor. The elevator could barely hold the two of us and shook violently when it stopped or started. We went through an unmarked door, and were surprised to find our hotel’s front desk. Check in was no problem at all, and here I am.

I’m guessing we will find out tomorrow that this is not as sinister of an atmosphere as it seemed to be tonight. But it certainly felt like quite an adventure.

It’s been a blast trying to speak German in such a safe atmosphere. The people are so kind and welcoming at this festival, it’s much easier to feel ok about asking endless linguistic questions. Someone gave us these awesome waffle cookies with a syrup, they were delicious.

It’s difficult to get internet here, which is why I’m typing this post on Timmy Jones’ computer in the morning instead of at night. Hopefully after today I’ll be back to posting videos and pictures and things.

It’s nice to meet new friends, from all over. I’m still gathering my thoughts I think. There is not much to write tonight other than the show was awesome, and I can not wait to play again tomorrow. Tomorrow’s venue is supposed to be pretty small, but it will be packed and crazy.

When we woke up in the morning we saw on the news that the public sector was on strike today and were picketing. The public sector is basically a ton of government workers, including school teachers, bus drivers, things like that.  We were a little worried that this would make our day difficult, it really only added a strange excitement to it.  Some of the protests got a little out of hand, at one point there were riot vans full of police and choppers all over the area we were in. Sirens and lights were everywhere. Although we didn’t see any violence of any kind, we did see a lot of angry people with signs marching the streets, and a lot of police making their presence known.

Today is a picture day. I think soon will be a video day, what do you think it should be about?

Everything looks really cool here. I really like it. I like the vibe, people walk really fast. In some ways it reminds me of Chicago. I’m realizing how much I’m affected by movies because of this trip.  When we go and see famous sites, like big ben or the palace it doesn’t really hit me. But when we’re taking a train across the countryside seeing all these little English villages, and rolling green grassy fields I feel like it’s a scene out of a movie. For some reason I believed that big ben really existed, but that these movies that were shot in the English countryside was filmed on a set or something.

I’m realizing how much I like talking to people. It’s so nice to be able to speak English and just get to know some of the people we encounter. I feel like I spent so much time in Spain struggling with my poor Spanish that I didn’t really get to connect with anyone.

Peter goes to a college in Guildford, so the town has a cool college town feeling.  We met some of his friends that live in a nearby house, and got dinner with another one of his friends.  Overall it was a pretty relaxing day. Hopefully we’ll get some good sleep tonight and be able to hit it tomorrow. The plan is to go into London and go crazy trying to see everything you need to see when you’re here.