I often complete trip journals 2 - 3 years after the trip. So . . . yes.
I suck at doing anything in a timely fashion.
Just wanted to say, to those who haven't heard me excitedly expound already, yes the trip to Europe was super awesome. If you conveniently ignore the @#*(@$%* weather and that night I was held hostage in a sleeper car by a scary German bachelor party, it was pretty much flawless. Meeting my pen pals and European relatives was a lot of fun (everyone was super nice!), and I learned I can get by with my French, although my mouth usually was much quicker than my brain, and I would go ahead and say something, and then think "Oh, you used the wrong verb tense there. And both articles had the wrong gender. And here's a better word you could have used. Actually, that whole sentence was a mess. Did they understand you at all?!"
This is certainly a trip where I'll remember the food. The wonderful, delicious, highly caloric and fat-laden awesome northern European soul food. And hopefully I'll go into more detail on that in the future. (I have to! I have pictures!) But for now, I just want to say that after the people and the food, this is what I'll remember when I think of this trip:
(Click on pic to see full-sized version.)
Maybe not such a big deal for most, but I grew up with windmill imagery just everywhere. Unfortunately, I had never never seen a windmill that wasn't on a plate, or a cup or a teapot. So now I've seen an actual windmill! In the flesh! (Wooden flesh!) So that was really cool. I'm sure all my hosts were weirded out by my overenthusiastic windmill squeeing whenever I saw one. And I saw one in every country I went to! Who knew there were Swedish windmills?!