T-minus 9 Days

I have been just awful at posting updates. That's mostly because I am working non-stop on this trip and on the new house my family purchased. You see, the weekend I leave for this trip, I also have a wedding to go to in Maryland and a large family gathering. The wedding is for my buddy Eric from Elon. And the family gathering is my grandparents and my uncle and cousins are flying in from Italy. Not to mention my sister down from NYC. So there is a lot to do.

When I go to sleep after Eric's wedding, the night of the 18th, I will be staying up until I get on the plane at 8am sunday morning. I'm sleeping on the plane because I have to stay overnight in Heathrow to wait for my flight to Dublin. It's gonna be a rough couple of days. But very very exciting.

I'm starting to make a list of all the places in Europe I want to see with my 21 days. There isn't enough time, not by a long shot. It would take me a lifetime to see everything. One place I know I want to see is Stuttgart. Two or three expensive car companies, Legoland, and a short train ride from Bavaria and a dozen ancient castles. It's gonna be awesome!

Final Relaxed and Home

Sorry I haven't updated in a month guys. Graduation and everything else was absolute insanity. But I'm back and I only have 23 DAYS TIL THE TRIP!!! I'm freaking out a little bit. Anyway this is gonna be a big post, so I'll cut into three. I thought I would update you guys on my gear, visas, and hotels. First the gear.

I managed to get a $200 backpack for only $100 thanks to eBags. High Sierra TR102 Railpass. Main Pack is 3050 cubic inches. Day Pack is 976 inches. Adjustable shoulder straps. And metal zippers, for better locking. Heres a pic:

Your trusty computer nerd is also bringing a nice little solid state, linux netbook so he can stay in touch with everyone. Dell is the only one who provides this kind of netbook, which is weird cause I feel like theres a market for this. And of course he is jailbreaking his iPhone so he can

twitter his GPS coordinates as often as possible. This way I can make a map of my whole trip at the end. Here's a picture of the netbook.

Finally I also found a $150 digital camera for $70. 10.1 Megapixels 3x zoom and takes AA batteries. The batteries are much better than charged in an emergency. Here's a pic of that as well.

Coming up after the break, visas and hotels.

!(Summer Time)

Wow it is not even close to summer time. I have not posted in FAR too long. Sorry guys. On the plus side, we have a bunch of updates. First off, we lost someone from the roster. Our hot chick has fallen by the wayside. Not really, she just found a better adventure. It looks like Laura will be doing a run with the Peace Corp. So a big congratulations to her!

We are now less than 1 year away (based on the countdown timer on the site, which actually has nothing to do with our actual departure date). So the next couple posts will be mostly based around gear. First on the list is netbook. I'll be waiting til December to buy the thing, but I know I will need something when I'm abroad. So here are the specs I think I'll need:

Processor: >= 1ghz

Memory: >= 1gb

Drive: >= 8gb SSD

Resolution: >= 1024x600

OS: Linux Distro

Cost: <= $400.00 USD

Right now I'm looking in the direction of the ASUS Eee PC 901. My biggest concern is that I have no way of checking out the Wireless cards. I've noticed the Linux has trouble with wireless. I've had laptops in the past that worked fine with Windows, but with Linux the wireless card would not have the same range, or sometimes would have almost no range at all. So I need to research a little and figure out which netbook has the right wireless card for my needs.

Anyway, hopefully my next post will be in a few weeks, and I'll talk about backpacks. But more likely I'll just ramble on about nothing.