Living a Dream

I'm just as upset about that title as you are. Bellinzona, Switzerland. Ever heard of it? Of course you haven't - neither had I. We found out about this place because it was one stop past aforementioned Lugano on the train, and it looked just heavenly in photos. It has three main castles from medieval times that are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it's nestled between the Alps, so it seemed like a great place for our first-engaged-getaway. We hopped on the train early Saturday and arrived in town to be pleasantly greeted with a huge open-air street market, which has reportedly taken place every Saturday for the past 500 years. How cool is that? Almost by mistake, we stumbled into the first castle and promptly strolled in/around/through it for a good hour before booking it back to the hotel to drop our things off and run back to the other castles. Of course, because it's a beautiful town in the mountains, there's also a river that we had to cross betwee...

Almost anyone who's ever gone to Italy has made a point to go to Venice. It's unique beyond compare, it's weird, it's got more history than you realize, and it's strangely beautiful. In fact, when Graham and I went to visit Europe in 2012, we had a 20 hour stint in Venice for all of those reasons. Not surprisingly, it was on the list of Jenna's "we have to go there" places in Italy. So on a random weekend when we hadn't planned anything else, we took a 7:00 a.m. train to Venice, arriving by 10:00 in a quest to see the city for a day. Fact about Venice: you cannot walk in a straight line for more than about 100 yards unless you're on the far side of the city. Every street dead-ends, goes over a bridge, or comes to a big square before dead-ending. It is quite possibly the most confusing of any city in Italy, and that's unbelievably impressive, considering the competition. Everything we actually did in Venice kind of pales in relation to...

Some time around 2010 a friend of mine was explaining his Eurotrip and mentioned going canyoning in Interlaken, Switzerland. I'd never heard of it. You apparently throw on a wetsuit and helmet and throw yourself off of cliffs, under waterfalls, over waterfalls, between rocks, and other things in rivers/streams in mountains. It sounded incredible. I regretted not finding a way to do it when I visited Europe in 2012, but planned to find a way eventually. So for my 28th birthday, Jenna agreed to humor me and give this a try. We contacted my Austrian cousin Norbert (who is a bit of a thrill-seeker) and tried to match our schedules so he could join. Unfortunately, while Interlaken was a few hours from us, it was about a 12 hour drive for him, so we'd have to look somewhere else. Norbert knew Austria well enough to know that we could find a place near Innsbruck, and so we met him there for a 36 hour stay in the home of both the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics. For our part, we ...

Yes, it's still hard to read it as "niece" instead of "nice" but that's OK. We went to Nice aftger we discovered that we were only a train-ride away, and even though it was late in the summer season, the weather was going to be stupendous and the tickets cheap. Not to mention we got an affordable, poorly reviewed hotel; time for an adventure! Nice is in the heart of the French Riviera, aka the Blue Coast, which is famous for rocky beaches, beautiful landscapes, and obscenely wealthy people doing obscenely wealthy things. We decided to be outsiders and leave our mega-yacht at home. The train went from Milan to Genoa, then along the Mediterranean coast for three full hours. Every five minutes was punctuated with us saying "yeah, that would be a nice place to visit." The beaches were gorgeous, people were swimming, kids were playing, etc. We arrived at about noon and quickly went to drop our bags at our hotel, which actually had a room already a...

One non-negotiable fact in my relationship with Jenna has been that some day we would have to go to Ireland. It's her dreamland. The majesty of the patchwork Irish countryside and the rocky coastlines and such - it's just been her dream to go there. I certainly didn't object. So when we realized that we'd be starting classes on Monday, the 22nd of September, we decided to book our last long-trip til Christmas - we'd go Wednesday to Ireland, and we'd come back really early Sunday morning. Flights were cheap, we could day-trip to the Cliffs of Moher, we'd spend a couple of days in Dublin, and then we'd rent a car and drive around on Saturday. Bulletproof. We arrived on Wednesday and began wandering Dublin. It was, shockingly, a pretty overcast day, so nothing looked quite as pretty as we'd hoped. We visited Trinity College and decided not to pay 10 euros to see the Book of Kells, watched a man feeding swans at St. Stephen's Green from his hands...

There's something to be said for a reputation. I know that, and I understand that. Michael Jordan is widely considered to be the best basketball player of all time - a claim which I won't dispute. He is a living god to the city of Chicago, and if you badmouth him in any way, locals will take it worse than if you'd said unkind things about their wives/mothers, etc. In Europe, when someone asks where we're from, Jenna answers Chicago, and if I answer, I say Cleveland via Chicago (or something like that). Invariably, everyone's response will mention one of two names: Barack Obama or Michael Jordan. But Jordan *much* more often than Obama. For the most part, I get it. He was the most dominant player for the better part of a decade. He was the face of the NBA. He starred alongside Bugs Bunny in one of cinema's greatest accomplishments. That's all true and inarguable. But there's a big part that I don't really get. For instance, I have a student of...

So yes, the plan was to just travel as much as we could before we knew our schedules. During the first couple of weeks there was a lot of emailing, interviewing, and finding out what we might be doing for work. It came slowly, and the stress of not knowing where we could work and what exactly we would be doing motivated us to take short breaks in the form of weekend trips. A quick Google-Flight search showed us round-trip airfare to Brussels for about 40 euros per person. Again, that's round-trip. So that's how we settled on Brussels, and we knew next to nothing about the city.. The first course of action was to peruse wikitravel, which told us some things to see and do. Second course was to ask a friend of mine who lived in Brussels for quite some time, and he gave us a suggestion of a place or two to eat. Some time around noon on September 14th, we flew over the Alps and discovered that this was going to be a whole year of unbelievable new things. Our flight lande...

As many of you know, this whole experience has given the two of us opportunities that we never imagined in our wildest dreams. Everyone has been asking, so I'm finally going to start writing about the specific travel experiences, and I'll start with our first one. (you should know that I've been keeping a travel journal that's currently 65,000 words/105 MS word pages long and counting, with at least 10 trips left to add. Soooo if any of you know anything about the publishing world, we should talk) Before we left the States, any overtime work or a big sale at work would be followed by "That's a trip to Switzerland!" Lugano, Switzerland is just across the border from Milan, a whopping 50 minutes away via train. This was our goal for the first place to whimsically go. We arrived in Milan on a Thursday and walked around the city a tad. We walked around it a lot more on Friday. On the way home we stopped at the main railway station...and we bought tickets t...

To try justifying that post-title, I want you to consider something with me that I've not really delved into. Most of this blog has been about bits and pieces of the teaching experience and I haven't really done much to tell you about the 20 weekend trips we've taken to the 10 different countries we've now visited. That's partly selfish of me (for not telling you) and partly unselfish of me (for not rubbing it in anyone's face).  I want to make a slight change. I want to tell you about these things, but I want to do it in the right way. A lot of times I make jokes, and a lot of times I downplay important things (hi, I'm a defense mechanism, what are you?), but I want everyone to experience the things that I've been lucky enough to experience. So in order to make that happen, I'm going to make myself vulnerable.  See, the theme of this entire trip/move/experience has been to grab life by its metaphorical horns and really do something when the c...