two days left in Seattle

So I am off to Europe in two days.

My aunt did some architectural design for an Italian villa a few years back, and her compensation was lifetime access to the villa for a couple weeks each year. Pretty sweet. Generally she goes over with my mother and their other sister and a few friends, but I've always been on the invite list as well, just never took them up on it. This year all the stars aligned with respect to savings (some), job commitments (none), and motivation (it's been way too long!).

Since getting to Europe from Seattle involves a nontrivial amount of flying, I decided to extend the trip on the front side. Iceland's only a seven hour flight from here, and everybody raves about the place, so I am starting there, then on to Scandinavia. It's not exactly the best time to be that far north, but it's still before the equinox, so I'll get 12 hours of sunshine a day, clouds allowing. The weather predictions right now suggest rain, clouds, and mild temperatures, in other words Seattle winter weather, which I don't love but can certainly tolerate.

I'll be doing Iceland and Norway solo, but in Sweden I will be meeting up with a couple Americans. My friend Mike is working in Sweden on a four-month contract, and the plan is to meet up with him in Copenhagen. Then I will backtrack a bit to Stockholm, where a friend of my aunt has generously offered to host me for a day or two.

The itinerary between Sweden and Pisa is wide open at this point. I have done Western Europe before, so an Eastern route would expose me to new places like Berlin, Prague, etc. But I have places to stay in France and possibly Spain, and I really like both countries and want to brush up on my language skills. So we'll see.

Every trip starts with preparations, and they're never exactly fun, but they're part of the story.

Booking flights was a bit of a challenge, because I'm doing a very odd trip, not only in terms of entering/exiting Europe, but also in terms of leaving from the West Coast here and returning to the East Coast. I will actually be flying to Dublin for the very last days of the trip to get a good one-way flight back to the States. There was probably a more sensible way to arrange my flights, but none of them are super expensive, and maybe it's good serendipity to do it the way I'm doing it.

With the most important travel legs arranged, as well as hotels/hostels for the first week, I'm down to a bunch of trivial errands--got my international driver's license, bought a more suitable backpack, dusted off my camera, upgraded my phone plan, got some music on to iPhone, etc. So I basically have packing left, then call my credit card companies, and get on a plane!