Category Archives: Backpacking

Monday 7/29 – Though hungry and tired, hours later we arrived safely in Lisbon! From the airport, we took the metro to our hostel area, and proceeded to walk through what can only be described as the Warsaw ghetto of Lisbon – we finally found Johnie’s Place on the top of a mountain. Since weContinue reading “Part 8 (The End): Lisbon”

Thursday 7/25 – We safely arrived at Madrid’s Barajas International Airport.  We took the familiar metro from Barajas towards Nuevos Ministerios, switched to Line 10 towards Tribunal, and then were supposed to switch to Line 1 towards Atocha but were surprised to find out that Line 1 was partially closed due to construction.  At thisContinue reading “Part 7: Madrid”

Monday 7/22 – Monday morning we left Florence and trained southward to our final destination on the Italian peninsula, Rome.  Our train pulled up to Termini Station in the early afternoon and from there we walked to Hotel Independienza.  Definitely a 1-2 star max “hotel” (I don’t understand why they can brand themselves as hotelsContinue reading “Part 6: Rome”

Friday 7/ 19 – Where did we leave off? Well, we safely made our train from Venice to Florence! This particular train was operated by Trenitalia, and was the nicest train we had been on thus far.  Upon arriving in Florence, we only had a short walk to our hostel; I tried to make aContinue reading “Part 5: Florence + Cinque Terre”

7/18 – We managed to pull ourselves together in time to catch our train over to Venice.  Upon our arrival to the Santa Lucia Station, we initially attempted to direct ourselves towards the new hostel using the directions we’d grabbed from their website.  The only issue here was that the directions were from the mainlandContinue reading “Part 4: Venice”

7/16 – Well, we made it to Milan finally! Hello Italia.  Although several randies tried to claim their seats were in our little train cubicle, we indeed arrived in one piece to the train station in Milan that night.  From there we got a taxi to Minas Hostel… Minas had a really nice staff andContinue reading “Part 3: Milan”

NICE – 7/15  – Monday at the crack of dawn, we sleepily checked out of St. Christopher’s Inn and made our first of three trains Nice bound.  Definitely slept through the first train ride- Bastille Day wears a person out I tell ya!  Despite having the train route from hell, we did eventually arrive inContinue reading “Part 2: Nice”

PARIS – So Friday, July 12th came very quickly and of course Cass and I hadn’t packed for our three-week backpacking adventure until the day of so that was special!  In an unfortunately hung-over, humid, and hurried state we stuffed our supposedly TSA regulation backpacks with as much as we possibly could.  A few hoursContinue reading “Backpacking Trip Part 1: Paris”

Well, San Juan has come and gone and I can’t say I’m all that sad to see it go.  Having been here in Barcelona two summers ago, I had celebrated San Juan then and quite enjoyed myself.  The corresponding regional traditions of San Juan include bonfires on the beach, running into the ocean at midnight,Continue reading “Rookie Mistake”