Living a Dream

A man named Parker Fernandez was one of my college roommates during my senior year at Ohio University. We then lived in different areas for a few years, but he would occasionally show up in Chicago and we'd have a hell of a time wandering the city. Not long after I came to Italy, Parker moved to Madrid to teach English through a much-more-official-than-mine program. In mid-November, Jenna and I visited him. This is our story. We had a 6:40 a.m. flight from an airport almost an hour outside of Milan, so we got up at 3, waited outside for an overnight bus to take us nearish the train station, then walked 2/3 of a mile to the train station, got on a shuttle bus, and arrived at the airport around 5:30. That's not a fun start. I stayed optimistic and upbeat, my bride to be was...less enthused. We were both also getting sick. Madrid is big. Like, really big. Just the airport took ages to get through, and eventually we got the train to the appointed meeting location for Parker and...

This is going to be tricky, because as of today, 17 March (see how European I am now?), we've been to Verona three times. The first was a brief stopover when our train rested there for two hours and we walked into the town center and were shocked to find such nice things. The second was the weekend I'm about to briefly discuss, and the third was Valentine's Day, which was full of chocolate and a bit of rain. The first time we saw Verona and walked into town, all we really knew about it was that Star-Crossed Lovers fictitiously lived there and committed suicide in a comedy of errors known as Romeo and Juliet. Apparently the entire town center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it's a wonderfully preserved historic town, complete with an intact Roman arena which served as a template for the Colosseum in Rome. As added bonuses, there's a medieval castle with a delightful bridge, a super expensive shopping street full of window-shopping pedestrians all day long...

This is another you've definitely never heard of. During the trip to Innsbruck, I mentioned that we passed lots of towns and areas that just looked lovely - places we thought we'd fancy a visit to at a later point, but didn't know when. Avio was one of the towns I'd written down as a possibility. It had a castle, it had bike paths on the river, and it was nestled between mountains in the Italian Alps. Avio is a classic "blink and you'll miss it" town, and actually staying there made it seem all the more, well, tiny. We booked a BnB that offered breakfast and free bikes, which meant we could ride up and down the valley as long as our butts could handle it, and that's precisely what we did. We got in early in the afternoon and figured we'd find a place to get something to eat or get some bread or...something, and then we'd check in later in the afternoon. Or maybe we'd go see the castle. Good thing we had the castle as an option, becaus...

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...

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...

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...