11 Days and Counting

Let me begin by explaining the evolution of this trip in my mind. It began last spring, spring of 2008, as a result of my creeping feeling of constant boredom. No matter what I did, I was bored. I think it had more to do with my recent leaving of Rochester to live in Philadelphia for 6 months for a co-op than really with me being truly bored with my life. I hadn't yet made many friends, and I was really looking for something to keep me excited. Going home alone every night, making dinner, and watching movies isn't exactly the most exciting thing a 20-year-old can do with his evenings.

Anyway, the idea initially came from the book Delaying the Real World. I bought it online on a whim. It's a great book, and I recommend other people my age definitely take a look at it. I wanted to leave America. Period. Never look back. I wanted to buy an open-ended plane ticket for myself and maybe find one other person to get one too. We would fly to Europe with some starting funds, and just go. I imagined us funding the trip by finding small odd-jobs for some cash when our money started to dwindle. We would just go and go and go, traveling the world until we got so homesick or so broke we had to take the next flight back to the states. I think the whole idea was awesome, but totally unrealistic and romanticized.

Reality check. After sitting down and thinking about how my remaining years in college would need to be laid out so I could graduate on time, I figured out that I could fit this trip in the summer after my 4th year of school. This was assuming, of course, that I could somehow find a 3-month co-op for the fall after my return. During this time, my good friend Michael Goldberg and I chatted on the phone almost every night for hours. He was on co-op in sunny California at the time, and we always had wonderful conversations when I busy being bored and he was on his way home from work. At this point we had already gotten back from our unforgettable trip to Israel on Birthright, and we both were badly itching to travel again. So I told him my idea and asked if he'd be willing to come. He of course was thrilled about it, and long story short, eventually agreed. I carefully chose two other friends from RIT, Alex Koroleski and Jordan Carrick, to ask as well. Eventually Jordan decided he wouldn't be able to come, but Alex stuck with us. So it's just the three of us now.

We started planning this almost immediately upon returning to Rochester in August. First it was just meetings between the four of us, talking over beers and pizza on the balcony of Michael's apartment about the ideas we had for the trip and the direction we wanted it to take. After a month or so, we (mostly Michael) started buckling down and really planning this. Many hour-long or more conversations over the phone and in person were started around this as we began planning this 3-month trip. Eventually we all realized how truly, infeasibly expensive a 3-month trip across Europe would be. Grudgingly, I agreed that we should probably reduce it to 2 months. I didn't really want to do that, since that would mean, for me, that the trip had gone from an indefinitely long time period down to 2 months. That's quite a reduction.

After 9 months of brainstorming, researching, and planning, the three of us have our backpacks, sleep sacks, EurRail passes, cell phones and calling plans, travel insurance, extra flash memory cards, hostel reservations, and plane tickets along with a full itinerary and map of where we would be traveling during our 65 night, 66 day trip through Europe. All we have left are our train reservations themselves, which a wonderful lady named Karen who works for a company called EurAide is getting for us. Hopefully those should be in Cleveland at my parents' house later this week.

Now all that's left to do is finish my final exams, pack my apartment into storage, and bring the essentials back to Cleveland this Saturday. Then, on May 30th, the three of us fly into Dullus International Airport and settle in for our 7 hour connecting flight across the Atlantic into London, where our trip begins.

I plan to keep up with this blog during the trip, keeping you all updated with posts and photos of our adventures. Stay tuned.