Pre-flight: Bloody Mary and a Man Purse

Greetings from DIA!  We’re about to get on our first plane from Denver to Charlotte.  We arrived at the airport early (thanks John), and had a little time to kill so Mike got a Bloody Mary and watched Sports Center Top 10 plays to feel better about wearing his man purse.  He likes sports more than his purse.  I already had a close call when I realized I was missing one of the 2 long sleeved shirts I packed.  Oops, I left it at the Sports Bar.  Imagine that…Don’t worry Mom, I got it back.

   :) – Katie

Packing the packs

Yikes!  It’s a lot of work getting ready for our 3 week adventure.  We packed, and unpacked, and packed again in order to get down to the bare minimum.  I think we got it though.  After we dropped the dog off, we decided to get the packs on and go for a walk around the block with our headlamps at 9:00 at night.  Only in Colorado is that sort of thing normal.  So we’re leaving  on a jet plane tomorrow for London and staying in a hostel in a room with 8 other people.  We’re both really excited for the adventure.  We promise the blogs are going to start to get more exciting starting tomorrow.  Wish us luck!

Ryan's Birthday, Ashley Graduates College, Tracy bought a new Subaru Outback, Mike is done for the school year, and we bought a NetBook

So much good stuff going on today and tomorrow.  First and foremost, let me give a big shoutout to my brother Ryan!  He turned 24 today!  His beautiful fiance Ashley is graduating from college tomorrow, so...CONGRATS on that.  Big time!!!!  We are really excited for you guys, and wish you all the best in all your wedding planning and future job/grad school planning.  My sister Tracy bought a new Subaru today.  Congrats (pictured above).  Also, today was my last day of my fourth year teaching at Fairview High School (5th year coaching J.V. Lacrosse).  Time flies!

Today we used Best Buy gift cards along with a gift card that Katie won at work (because she’s incredible at her job) to buy a Gateway NetBook for our trip.  The picture here is one from closing day at Vail back in April.  I just wanted to test this NetBook on importing photos from our digital camera before we leave.  Bam!  It works magic.  Let’s hope it works this well overseas. 

Our (general) Itinerary

Europe?  Sounds fun.  Here's where we'll be going:

London --> Paris --> Annecy --> Nice --> Monaco --> Cinque Terre --> Interlaken --> Berne --> Zuerich --> Paris --> London

20 days.  A mix of hostels and hotels.  Backpacks.  Two pairs of ex-officio underwear.  Trains.

If you've been to any of these places, and there are things we MUST do, please let us know.  We're new at this.  Keep in mind we'll only be in each place for a couple of days.

Can you tell we're excited?

Gear Up For Eur-Up!

We have had a blast recently getting ready for our Europe adventure. Thanks to many friends and family we were able to use over $600 in gift cards to REI to buy packs and all the little millions of things you need when you're going to Europe on a budget. We leave in less than a week, and we couldn't be more excited. I'm pretty sure we're bringing the computer, so we'll be blogging a lot and updating you all with photos. Wish us luck!