“Umm, did you hear that sound?” I oh, so casually ask Laura as we drive out of minuscule town of Doolin, on our way to the Cliffs of Moher.
Laura, partially deaf in one ear bless her heart, gives a definitive shake of her head and then re-launches into her story as I can’t shake the nagging feeling like something just happened to the car after the absolutely massive pot-hole I ploughed over at speedy 55 kilometers an hour.
With an ear tuned toward Laura’s story I continue carefully navigating my puttering …

I think that it’s been perhaps evident that I’ve been getting a bit worn out lately. All of the constant movement of the road is catching up with me and I am just tired and I don’t want to constantly pick up and move. The weariness is starting to show now though in some not so great ways.
After my time in Český Krumlov Cousin H and I were flying to Amsterdam out of Prague. Why flying? Well trains in Europe are expensive if you don’t book ahead…and we didn’t…mostly because …

It’s eight months into this trip around the world and I am falling apart at the seams. Two main things have happened:
1)      My computer is, quite literally, falling apart.
2)      I have an allergic reaction to a tick bite from my frolic in Plitvice Lakes National Park.
My computer has been showing signs of being ill for sometime now but I always just refused to accept that it might not make it back home with me in a few months. Finally, though it boycotted and the screen has no tension and …

My lucky weather streak didn’t hold and our travel day from Milna started a bit ominously, I woke up to the sounds of thunder in the distance and a quick look outside the cottage window showed a sky pregnant with dark clouds and rain –it didn’t bode well for making it across the country and to a new Croatian town.
But, rain wasn’t about to stop us so it we spent the morning closing up the cottage, putting away the dishes, locking closed the windows and repacking our packs. I rarely …

Continued from Round the World Travel Torture
The cab to the ferry to the ferry
The cab makes the 2 kilometer drive to the docks in record time and we tumble out of the vehicle in true clown car style, sling our packs onto our backs and dart into the customs line for a perfunctory passport check where the customs official stamps our passports and rapidly shoos us away to catch the ferry.
It’s still there!
As we jog toward our ferry we pass by a large group of older Eastern European women …

One of the less charming features of the Assisi hostel was the lock-out from 9:30am through 4:00pm – that meant that although we didn’t need to leave for the train station until nearly 11:00am we were forced to sit outside of the Ostello de Pace for a couple of hours warming up in the morning sunlight until it was time to catch the public bus to the train station. This bus was the first of the eight legs of our never ending travel day.
One of the reasons I am …

The time-line in Nepal was a little disjointed on the blog, but basically, the weekend after our trip to Chitwan Helen and I said our goodbyes to our monasteries, gave Amrit a huge hug, and headed to Pokhara to do the Poon Hill trek through the Annapurna region and subsequently my stint in solitary confinement (ie. the pain-staking mind-purification process known as Vipassana meditation)
I was really sad to leave my monastery… the boys are so extremely welcoming and I felt like I was actually making a difference for them. …

The site-seeing around the Kathmandu Valley was really enjoyable and gave Helen and myself a jump-start of sorts into the Nepali Buddhist culture into which we were immersing ourselves. After several days touring around Kathmandu and our crash-course in Nepali language we were ready to head to our volunteer placement in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal.
At this point it behooves me to just note right of the bat that our volunteer company really let us down from this point onward and I would not recommend them to a single soul. …