Eastern Europe Plans

Trip Start Aug 31, 2007
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Trip End Apr 19, 2008


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Flag of Canada  , Alberta,
Sunday, August 19, 2007

The story of this trip begins on a snowy, cold, and truly miserable day in Fredericton, New Brunswick last February. Fredericton is a lovely town, beautiful in the summer, but the outdoor life of a student coupled with two weeks of -20 something weather is enough to get anyone down. Trudging to class that day, my mind stumbled across a wild idea: I could take the following year off from university and thereby avoid another Fredericton winter! Initially, I considered the idea ludicrous, but the more I thought on it (through a delightfully boring class) the more realistic the idea became until, three weeks later and after several intense conversations with my parents, I decided to make the trip a reality.

Eastern Europe seemed like a decent place to start my trip. The weather's nice in September and I'm hoping it won't get too terribly cold by December. The region is stable, transportation is regularly scheduled, and I shouldn't do too poorly with my knowledge of English, French, German, and attempts at the Cyrillic alphabet. Additionally, Eastern Europe is full of countries I would like to visit, but would most likely never make a 1-2 week trip to. I fully expect Macedonia to be fascinating, but I'm unlikely to purchase a trans-Atlantic ticket just to see that one country. Much better to roll the entire region into a 4-month odyssey.  That said, once I began reading about the countries I was to visit, I began to realize that I would be hard pressed to visit all of them, in the detail I desired, in the amount of time I had allotted. Thus, Poland and Croatia (with the exception of Dubrovnik) were striken from the intinerary and stashed away for future trips. December is not the time to visit Croatia's Agean coast anyway. I still am sceptical about my ability to make it to all fourteen countries before the 23rd of December, but that's the joy of travel. I'll make it up as I go along.

And now for the proposed itinerary: I will begin in Estonia and continue on to Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus. I plan to spend a couple weeks in the Ukraine before heading for Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria. Macedonia is next, followed by Albania, Montenegro, and Dubrovnik, with Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia rounding out the end of the trip. I have chosen to fly out of Belgrade, Serbia as it can be reached within 24 hours from most places in southeastern Europe.

I have a busy two weeks ahead of me before my departure and while I'm certainly getting excited about my upcoming adventure, I'm also getting scared. However, it's always surprising what you can do when you have no choice but to do it. 13 days from now, I will be in Tallinn, Estonia, and we'll just have to see what happens from there.
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