USA

I finished packing today, though the backpack itself was storing a plethora of gear, mostly from the past few weeks of me hording and collecting things I thought would be useful. We leave on Friday morning, and I have a feeling the next two nights are going to be rough. It's 12:30 am right now and I am still bushy tailed and wide-eyed wired from packing and picking up the house. Leaving my house and my pets is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. My mom is taking care of everything for me, but I still worry.

I'm just glad I am going on this adventure with my husband. I cannot imagine being so far away from him for two months.

8 more days until we leave to Europe. I am extremely excited and nervous all that the same time. I've never left my house more than two weeks and we've always been relatively close to home, so that in an event of emergency, we could always drive home. So this is definitely a new experience.

20 more days!!!

We will be leaving on June 10, 2011 and have lay-overs in New York, Brussels, and then land in Nice, France. It will be a 13 hour flight. We will be staying in Nice, France for 2 days, then take a train to Sanremo, Italy on the 13th. We still don't know exactly what cities the summer camps where we will be working at will be, but I know that the camps are in or very near the main Italian cities (Milano, Florence, Rome, ect..). From July 30 until August 8th we will be situated in two hotels in Rome, and will plan to visit neighboring cities. Two whole months in a different country. Does 2 months count as living somewhere else? I want to be one of those cool people that go around telling others how they lived abroad and ate amazing food and drank amazing wine.

I've tried my best to organize. I even got a ipod touch app called TripIt that itemizes all of the flights and hotel stays. Technology these days, I tell yah. ;D

If anyone out there has any suggestions of places to visit around the large cities, please let me know! Any information would be helpful!!

So, I was really happy when I found an awesome backpacking backpack at Goodwill for $6.00. I was ready for anything the world threw at me 'cause I hads me the coolest backpack! ......Yeah, it was all fine and dandy until we filled it, measured it, and found that it was too big to be a carry-on. Poop.

So, the search was still on for a backpack that could fit the bill. We looked through backpacking forums to see what others were using.

We found this awesome backpack (pictured below) on sale on eBags.com. My husband bought two of them and the packing cubes, too! The backpack is called the Mother Lode TLS Weekender Convertible.

Please feel free to leave any advice, comments, or whatever! Thanks for reading!

We leave to Italy on June 10th, and I am already losing sleep. I am excited and nervous at the same time because this is my first time out of the United States. I have no idea what to expect. As much as friends and family have told me what’s it’s like over there, I know that experiencing it for oneself is the only real way of knowing what’s out there. I’ve searched website after website, sponging up as much information as I can from things like backpacking to crime to tourist traps.

I’ve slept about 3 hours every night since we got our plane tickets (about a week ago). I guess that would be enough sleep for an average Jane, but working with seventeen 5-year-old’s with only a few hours of rest could take a toll on a person!

If you have any advice or comments on traveling out of the country, please feel free to post!!