Travelogue!

I really like the idea of traveling, and I know I haven’t done a terrific job of it so far. There was a bit late in high school where I decided I was going to road trip all over the place, but sort of failed at that. It’s easy to tick off states you’ve been to if you’re living and driving around the east coast (particularly if you get lost in New England and spend about an hour driving in and out of Rhode Island), but I still haven’t really been west of the Mississippi. Well, “haven’t really” meaning “haven’t at all”. Which is a shame. I’ve been to Paris, which is something, but I also mostly just followed the lead of the person I was visiting there who spoke French and knew more or less what the deal was. Now, I’m on my way to Greece. Athens, after a brief layover in Philadelphia, then an eight hour boat ride to Santorini for a friend’s wedding. I’m apparently not the world’s best flyer, which makes nine hour flights to Southern Europe a little bit more nervewracking.

In any case, I’m always looking for something to actually blog about, and so you’ll be getting some kind of Murphspot travelogue. Murpalogue. Travelmurp. It’ll be fun.

I think.

So far, the trip has mostly consisted of realizing that our cars were going to be ticketed because we’d be parked where Chicago’s going to try to do some street sweeping, frantically attempting to find a place to park that we can reasonably be sure that they won’t do that, and then rearranging everything we’d carefully packed into one large suitcase so that we didn’t have to pay $150 to get our clothes to Greece. Apparently, several of the people who boarded around us are also making a connection to Athens, the difference being that they (including the person manning the jetbridge) speak Greek. I do not. I’ve been assured that this won’t be a problem, but I’m anticipating at least some amount of hilarious translation (read: mundane and frustrating) mixup, which I’ll dutifully post here. I knew at least enough French to get around in Paris (which I’ve since forgotten), and really only had a problem when I realized that I wasn’t sure which word on the doors meant “push” and which meant “pull”. Hopefully, the stilted Greek I’ve gathered from a “Delude Yourself into Trying to Learn a Completely Foreign Language in Four Hours” cd will come off as endearing and people will take pity on the poor, merely bilingual (but not in the applicable language) American tourist.

Now, though, I’m on a plane to Philadelphia, where the most I’ll have to worry about is someone recognizing a tinge of a Pittsburgh accent and mocking me about the Pirates. I’m fine with that.