Trip Of The Year

Rome, Italy

mattpharr — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:32:34 +0000

Sorry about not posting for a while – the past couple of days have been full of travelling, scheduling stuff, and exploring Rome. Today we pretty much walked all over Rome – we saw the Colosseum, a LOT of Roman ruins dating back to roughly 900 B.C., many many monuments, and quite a few people trying to sell us stuff we don’t need. I actually just mapped out our route on maps.google.com and figured out that we walked approximately 14 miles today – no wonder my feet hurt! Both Josh and I have been wearing sandals all day – Nathan decided to have sweaty stinky feet and wore his shoes.

We tried to find a park while waiting for the day to cool down so we could explore the Basilica, but ended up getting slightly lost. We could see the park from where we were, but every entrance to it was blocked off or one level on the hill above us. We finally ended up next to a huge fountain that people were soaking their feet in. We unanimously decided that that looked like a good thing to do, so all of us plopped down and stuck our feet in the fountain. It was a much needed rest and the water was very cool and relaxing.

Tomorrow morning at around 10:45 we will set off for Naples and the Pompeii ruins and hopefully a beach somewhere to work on our tans. At least, Josh and I will be working on our tans. Nathan will be various shades of red.

I guess that’s all for now until we make it to another internet cafe somewhere in Naples…only one week left in this great trip!

And I feel fine!

buehler — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 06:53:37 +0000

It’s the beginning of the end as we know it… It’s a great song, but when put in “context” in the middle of a trip half way around the world, you start to think about the words and not just the tune. Matty, Pinky, and I have embarked on a trip, today being the first day of our adventure. So far, the only things we have to show are half a dozen scorched eggs, which we all ate whole-heartedly.

We started in Seattle, only to find out that we were not flying out of “Seattle”… the airport is not located in the city. But with Matty at the wheel, we were on our way. London was our first stop, with a four hour layover, which soon turned into five hours. (we needed the extra beauty sleep). We finally got on our plane and were off for Switzerland. 11:45pm, we found Pinky waiting for us and before you knew it, we were on the road, back to the school where he RA. We drove threw France, for just a brief second (we’ll be going back) and headed into the country side of Germany. The only plans for today are, hiking, check out a castle, and maybe… sleep a little!!! Watch out Europe, WE ARE HERE!!! Such a wild group we are!!

Paris at last!

mattpharr — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 06:42:38 +0000

Paris at last! We learned something very important about travelling in this city. You have to make sure that you have a hostel picked out and reserved before you get to the city. We got to Paris yesterday around 5 in the evening and had quite a bit of trouble finding someone to give us directions to a hostel. Nathan finally scored and was able to get clear directions to a hostel. Turns out they only had room for one night and they ended up putting Josh and Nathan in one room and me in another room with a family that I think was from Spain.

My allergies were bothering me a little bit, so I was scared about snoring loudly and making the other people in the room uncomfortable with my loud American behaviors, but after hearing 3 of the 5 members of that family snoring louder than I, I was able to relax and drop off to sleep. This morning I woke up about 4:30 AM and wasn’t able to get to sleep until 6:30 or so. We were planning on having breakfast at 7:00, so this wasn’t much use to me.

Actually, apparently I’m the only one having breakfast today, as it is 8:45 AM and Nathan and Josh haven’t come down yet…Maybe I should go wake them up…

Anyways, the plan for today is to reserve tickets for the high speed train to Rome on Sunday, visit the Louvre, go have lunch in the Latin Quarter, check out the Eiffel Tower, and hopefully hit as many landmarks as possible on our way back to the other hostel.

I guess that’s all for now…I’m going to go wake up the boys and get them started

First day of vacation!

mattpharr — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:29:47 +0000

Today we start our travels! The drive up to Seattle was fairly uneventful except for my spur-of-the-moment trip to downtown Seattle while looking for the airport an hour before boarding. Apparently I missed all the signs for the Sea-Tac airport and decided to add a little bit of stress to the moment. How typical of me

The check-in and boarding process went very smoothly – since we were running a little late, they cut us to the front of the line at the security checkpoint. I must confess, I was feeling a little smug and very privileged as I looked at the long line of 100+ people waiting to go through security. The flight itself was boring and long – roughly nine hours in the air.

I was surprised at the choices of food they offered. Josh had the chicken while I had the salmon with pasta. They offered us wine to go with the meal, but we both politely declined. Not that I don’t like a glass of wine now and then, I just have an aversion to drinking alcohol while flying. Anyways, the salmon tasted like salmon but looked like halibut – pale and white instead of the bright orange and pink I am used to. It must have been real fish though, as I found a bone stuck in my teeth partway through the meal. Quite a far cry from the usual fare of soggy vegetarian lasagna or “chicken” sandwich they usually give out.

The seats on British Air are quite nice – each seat has their own flat screen tv and the seats themselves recline further than any other airplane I’ve been on. Each seat also has a footrest that folds out. Very nice indeed. We were seated right behind the bulkhead separating first class from the peasants, so we both had plenty of legroom for the whole trip.

Nathan picked us up from the airport in Basel, Switzerland – the airplane was running a little over an hour late and picking up the luggage took about 20 minutes, so he was patiently waiting for us out in the little corridor just past customs. I am so glad he waited and just didn’t leave us there…

I believe that’s all for now – I will try to figure out how to get pictures uploaded from the camera here pretty soon – I managed to leave the USB cable back at home, so getting pictures up on here might be a little interesting.