End of a Leg: European Thoughts

Well, we just created a European tier list of stuff. You will see that after all the Europe blogs come out. A week or two probably.

It’s 45 minutes until we head for the Porto Airport. We will spend our final night in Europe in the Barcelona Airport terminal. A rather unsexy location for the end of a six week journey, but that’s just how the flights and timing works out. These six weeks have both flown by, and felt like a lifetime.

The days are long and the weeks are short. It feels like yesterday we demanded to go to the Calgary airport four hours early because we were so nervous and excited. We certainly haven’t gotten better though, as we are giving ourselves the same time frame for this next step. But while that feels so recent, London and Belgium feel like a lifetime ago. It was only a month and a half ago we were sleepwalking through the V&A museum. It was a month and a half ago when we were caught in the rainstorm in Brussels. That’s not a lot of time at all.

When your making a lot of memories every day though, it adds up quick. So many little things happen. There are certainly funny moments we shared together that neither of us can remember anymore, crowded out by the more exciting adventures we did. I suppose that’s the point of writing it all down.

We have grown a lot in this time. We have learned how to work better together. We have learned how to lead and how to follow. We have learned how to delegate tasks. The balance of power between the both of us works a lot smoother the last two weeks rather than the first two.

It was great having our friends and family out to visit us too. Those days absolutely flew by. One day were stressed in Paris trying to find Ty, the next were hugging Matt and Marissa goodbye as they head for the Seville airport. We hope everyone else can come out too, so we can share more experiences.

We have met a lot of new friends too. Were already planning things with them in South America, or next year when we hopefully come back to Europe. We will have to hit up the Australians too when we head to Asia. Its been really great meeting all sorts of different (generally English or Australian) friends as we travel. There is a common theme between them all too. At least 40% are working in some sort of climate change related field, and almost all of them have a full undergraduate degree. And all of them are very well travelled. Maybe its cause the same types of people stay in the same types of hostels, but we have found a lot of common ground with strangers we have never met before.

Our perspective about life at home has also changed. Living out of the backpacks with the same stuff made us realize we can be happy without a lot of stuff and we don’t need it. The need for a big house, long commute, and lots of space seems so unnecessary since the way of living in Europe is so dense, small, and crowded. We now know what are standards of living are. We want reception, a clean bed, a shower head over 6’5″, a shower door (Europeans love not have having a curtain or half a curtain so water goes everywhere), no snoring strangers, and a fridge.

We should put our shoes on now and get our bags. We’ve got a bit of rearranging to do, as its us and a small pack for the next 24 hours. But new adventures, cultures, food and language wait for us on the other end, and we cannot wait to experience it!