Venice is a beautiful city, and I can’t wait to come back! Unfortunately I wasn’t really able to spend much time here at all. I took an overnight train from Florence and got in around 8:00 am. The night before I’d checked with the hostel association, and found that all the hostels...
I decided to take a day trip out of Florence to see the leaning tower of Pisa and the walled town of Lucca. The Italian train system is usually extremely efficient and it makes taking these type of quick trips a pleasure. However, I didn’t realize that every so often the workers tend...
The Tuscan region is fantastic. I’d heard that one of the things that you had to do was to take a bike ride around the area, so I hooked up with a local biking company. I was the only backpacker, which was kind of interesting. Two of the people on the trip were...
Getting here took longer than I thought it would…I missed the train by about 3 minutes, and had to wait for the next one. That one ended up being about an hour late, so I finally arrived in Florence about 3.5 hours later than I had expected. Luckily I found a GREAT hostel, and had...
I had forgotten how expensive Europe is! Luckily, I am only spending a few days here…I can’t believe I’ll be home in 9 more days.
After a long flight from Cape Town via London I arrived in Rome around 4ish. It took a while to find a room and it was getting dark by...
On our way to Amsterdam we stopped for a few hours in the town of Ulm. We’d heard about its amazing Gothic cathedral that was open to people to climb to the top. The cathedral is the 2nd largest in Germany and there are 768 steps to get to the top. We were there for...
After seeing the castles in Fussen, we decided to move on to someplace a little bit off the beaten track. We’d heard a lot about how much fun Prague was, so we pointed the van northeast and started out. It took about 8 hours of driving to get there, and we were actually disappointed that...
Before we headed to Prague, we decided to go south to Fussen to see the trio of Ludwig II’s castles. Fussen was a plesant little town, that very much catered to tourists. Being typical tourists, we felt right at home! We toured all three of the castles in the area, and spent the night in...
Oktoberfest was fantastic! The beer, the wine, the singing, and of course the women were all in your face kind of amazing. We had planned on spending most of our time in Germany here, but changed our mind after we found out how hard it was to get accommodation, and also how early the beer tents closed because of...
This was the most sobering part of our entire trip. I had very mixed feelings about going to this place, but I felt that I owed it to myself, and both the victims and the survivors to experience the horrors of this place first hand.  Of course I’d read about the Nazi atrocities in school,...
