What I'll be posting.

My first post! Greetings subscribers.

   I have made this blog to keep everyone up to date about what I'll be doing/seeing/visiting along my European travels. But since Brilliant Tessa and I don't leave until June, eight months away, I will keep whoever's interested updated on our planning, scheming, and other interesting travel related things between now and then.

   First, thank you to my brother. He spent the entire morning writing the code and manually, um, weaving...the RSS feed through his site?...so I can have email subscribers! I'm not really sure what he did, but it looked complicated all the same. Anyway, it *should* work.

   Right now, Brilliant Tessa is figuring out a day by day expense sheet, breaking costs down by each country. This includes looking up train schedules, estimating the expensiveness of the country, and looking into any personal contacts either of us may have there, in case we can stay with them. (Instead of hostels or couch surfing.) Lots of work considering we change our minds about a place every few days or so. Yeah, we're getting there.

   For the most part, with this extremely rough estimate and not even including exchange rates, it's about $400 (each person) a country. That's four night's stay, meals, transportation to get there/while there, possible museum passes, etc. This adds up quickly considering we're at...15 countries now? Anyway, once we get this done, planning our actual dates of travel (week to week) will be easier.

Example chart:
St. Petersburg & Moscow
Snacks for bus $5
Bus from Tallinn to St. Petersburg $20
Hostel in St. Petersburg 3 nights (Babushka House-six bed dorm) $42
Snacks for train $10
St Petersburg to Moscow train $45
Hostel in Moscow 3 nights (2 bed private room) $75
Food, Activities, Transportation in St Petersburg & Moscow $90
Dine out in St. Pet and Moscow $30
total $317

   For a few weeks near the end of the trip, we will make our way to Norway and Iceland. These are the coldest places, and also where we will be doing our 'hut-to-hut' traveling. (What is HTH?) These are located in the high-above mountains. We stay in hostels day to day and hike in between them to get to the next one. They say it gets to/below freezing even in midsummer, so I am working right now on getting a good packable but insulated sleeping bag. My amazing hiking boots came in the mail recently, and I'm super excited to try those out! The weather here is finally cooling off enough to start taking hikes, so I will break them in soon. I'll definitely need them over there.

   Also, today a friend of mine gave me an address for their friend in Paris. Now I'm going to go write a letter to her, and ask if she has room to host us for a few days next June! Maybe I'll try a little bit of my rusty French...or consult my good friend, Google Translate.

In case you're wondering:
   The temporary background to the blog is a picture I took in Melk, Austria last year. It's this beautiful little village located along the Danube. The village has pretty much one single attraction, Melk Abbey. I took the picture from one of the balconies of the Abbey, looking out at the oncoming storm over the village. The sun was setting, and it was absolutely breathtaking. And since it's below freezing in December, I could actually see my breath being taken away in little white puffs.

Until next time!

Leah