Drowning In The Tune

How To Backpack Europe

Here is my new, updated itinerary. I just wanted to put this on my blog to help potential travelers out.

This is basically an, “if I could do it all again, this is how I would do it” itinerary. I just omitted a few pointless stops that I had made and added a couple cities that I could’ve easily went to. But this is more or less what I did this past summer. And if you don’t know already, I did this trip in 80 days, and for less than $6000

For those who are new to my blog you can easily find everything I’ve written about my travels in Europe by using the drop-down menu that says “Wanderlust Tour: Europe”. I hope everything that I’ve posted can inspire you to travel and help you plan your next big trip! Feel free to ask any questions as well.

1. Istanbul (Turkish Airlines is a fantastic airline that consistently has the lowest fares to Europe. Plus, they give you a free, long-enough-to-leave-the-airport-and-explore-the-city, stopover in Istanbul. It’s like getting a free trip! I highly recommend flying Turkish Airlines when traveling to Europe!) 2. Rome 3. Naples 4. Positano 5. Florence 6. Tavarnelle Val Di Pesa/Barberino 7. Siena 8. Pisa 9. Venice 10. Milan 11. Tirano 12. Chur (Take the Bernina Express from Tirano to Chur. The Bernina Express is an incredibly scenic, UNESCO World Heritage site that you don’t want to miss!) 13. Interlaken 14. Lauterbrunnen and surrounding area (I recommend Murren, Gimmelwald, Wengen, and Männlichen) 15. Bern 16. Lucerne 17. Basel 18. Colmar 19. Strasbourg 20. Zurich 21. Vienna 22. Bratislava 23. Budapest 24. Salzburg 25. Munich 26. Schwangau (Neuschwanstein Castle) 27. Rothenburg ob der Tauber 28. Frankfurt 29. Cologne 30. Prague 31. Oświęcim/Auschwitz 32. Krakow 33. Berlin 34. Copenhagen 35. Malmö 36. Oslo 37. Amsterdam 38. Brussels 39. Paris 40. London 41. Inverness 42. Edinburgh

(Q: Why isn’t Spain included? A: Spain is huge, and far from the rest of Europe. Madrid is 12 hours away from Paris! If I had had a bigger budget and more time, I would’ve gone. But to be honest, Spain is a huge trip in and of itself. If you’re tight on cash and time, just save it for another time!)

I am risking nothing

I AM SORRY FOLLOWERS, I LOVE MY MOMMY

Will not risk.

Chelsea Miller, will you marry me?”

Reblog so you make enough money to cover your bills .

“but sex is what makes us human!”

  in 1916 a French officer in his twenties writes his

doctoral dissertation under

heavy mortar fire.

he sends it by mail, a page

at a time, to his wife.

a week before he’s to step up to the podium and

defend his work rather than hiscountry

he is killed in action.

even as the bullets rip

through him he still wishes he could have become a professor

in French literature and

the university awards him a posthumous Ph.D.

sex is

  a woman breaks down in tears on the phone because

a week is not enough time to

get over a breakup.

her sister drives an hour across town,

comes up the front steps with

a gallon of ice cream and somebeer

and together they eat moose tracks and marathon

every

single

Godzilla movie

ever made.

  sex is

she’s late for work but her car isn’t

starting and even through her coat and hat she’s cold.

she knows she can’t be late again because she’s missed

one time too many already because her

father’s nurse was sick with the flu and someone

needed to help him bathe.

the clock ticks past fifteen after and she hits

the wheel like it’s a heavy bag as though that will help

steps on the gas like the car will go

and wonders how she will pay rent

and how she will feed her father.

sex is

  it takes three people to hold the predator down because

even with the cover over his head

a bleeding eye and shattered wing

he is trying to hurt them.

none of them have seen this bird before in their lives but

they bandage his wing and head and give him a painkiller and

put him in a warm place to sleep and heal because

it is right.

at first he is paralyzed and cannot

fly but soon he is taking steps

and then fluttering, and then soaring, and

six months later he is whole and healed and hunting.

once he is gone they never see him again

which means they’ve done their jobs right.

sex is

  in 1969 a girl watches grey-and-white footage on her parents’ tiny television and

can’t quite believe that what she is seeing is not a movie set but

another planet.

the men on the screen look a little like

aliens with bulbous heads and no faces and fat

marshmallow arms

but they are still men.

her mother puffs on a cigarette behind her and declares that

this is progress

even if it was just a small step.

the girl grows up to be not an astronaut but a secretary

and her boss calls her ‘sweetheart’.

but sex is

  a boy is taught that real men don’t cry so

he doesn’t.

when his best friend dies from a self-inflicted

gunshot wound, he locks himself

in the shower every day and sobs under scalding

water until it runs cold

so nobody will see him grieving

so nobody will see that tears are just love that

has no place left to go.

he learns to dull love rather than suppress its expression and

soon the owner of the liquor store knows him by name.

three DUIs, two evictions, and twelve steps later,

he is feeding people at a homeless shelter,

and telling them it’s all right to cry.

Sex is

  the broken man tells the comedian

that he didn’t mean to step in front of the car but the rain

made it hard to see.

he seems okay but his leg

does not.

the comedian clutches a grubby receipt with the driver’s

plate number scrawled on the back

in pink pen, stands out in the rain so the broken man

can have his umbrella,

and gives him the comedy routine that ruined his career

so the man doesn’t think about the pain in his leg.

once he’s out of the hospital, the fixed man sends him a thank-you card

with kittens on it.

what makes us human

  yawning is contagious,

and there is a species of bird whose young we call “pufflings”.

melodic collections of sound, spaced by silence,

can move us to tears.

the tallest building in the world is

two-thousand seven-hundred and seventeen feet tall.

in less than eighty years we went from our first powered flight

to touching the moon,

and in one-hundred from the first phone call

to instantaneous connection between thinking machines of our own creation.

we make pies out of tree organs

and let cow’s milk ferment until it hardens and then

we put them together, because apple pie with cheddar cheese is delicious.

what makes us human is

the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are

two-hundred thousand years old .

we have had pet dogs

for sixteen-thousand of those years, longer

than corn

or the wheel.

the steps we take are part of

one of the most energy-efficient gaits the

animal kingdom has ever seen.

we invented the concepts of love

and hate

and justice, and mercy

and we invented the language to convey them.

we sharpened rocks, then metal, to convince other people

who don’t hold the same idea of those things as we do

because we think

it’s right.

we are two hundred millennia of love and disappointment and

sorrow and innovation and

mercy and kindness and dreams

and failure

and recovery.