Naturally you have to have some sort of plan to take on Europe, because no matter how long you have you definitely can't see it all. Hopefully three weeks will be plenty of time to travel around Europe and still be able to make it back to the States with a job waiting for me when I return.
Ideas started out with Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Switzerland, and possibly Germany. With three weeks we finally decided that Germany was at the bottom of our list and would be cut. After even further debate on how we wanted to do our traveling we decided to include Southern France and cut Venice, this allowed us to stay at a more comfy Bed and Breakfast in Avignon and travel to smaller French towns and hopefully find some time to see the Mediterranean Sea! After many hours of debate our final decision is as follows.
Dustin arrives to Paris Wednesday April 13th and the catches a train to Troyes where Ashley will be awaiting since she has to teach class until the 15th. Enjoy all that Troyes has to offer and let myself get used to being "the weird foreigner."
On the 16th, catch an early train ride to Paris and proceed down to Avignon where we hope to stay at Clos des Saumanes, a Bed and Breakfast that one of Ashley's friends highly suggested.
Stay for 3 nights then catch the Eurail to Switzerland. Where we plan to stay in a hostel for cheap and do some hiking and possibly some other adventures since its the second best place for adventure sports in the world!
On the 22nd or 23rd return back to Paris and stay with some of Ashley's amazing friends and spend Easter Sunday worshiping God at Notre Dame Cathedral, attending the International Mass at 1130 (its the only one with English). After mass we will head back to Troyes to pack up Ashley from her humble little apartment.
We will then be in Troyes and the surrounding area until the morning of the 28th when we will take the Eurail again up to Amsterdam. During our days of "downtime" we plan on heading to the Fontainebleau Forest, home to hundreds of thousands of sandstone boulders. I just could not be this close to a world class bouldering area and not at least try to do some climbing. So if weather permits we plan to get a couple of days in climbing, if it does not provide conditions to climb I would still love to walk around this magical forest.
Then to Queen's Day, or koninginnedag! It is a festival celebrating national unity and consists of a festival-like atmosphere which includes, the only day of free market in the Netherlands, dancing, open air concerts, children's games, carnival floats, parades, street theatre, fireworks, DJ music, decorated canal boats, along with everyone dressing in the country's color of Orange! So if you have any great orange costume ideas let me know!
We plan to return to Paris on the 1st of May and explore until our flight back to the United States of America on the 3rd!
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