Sunday, May 29

The semester is finally over! I'm excited to finally get back to the states and eat chipotle, use public restrooms, drive a car, and not pay exorbitant prices for food.  Although I'm ready to go back, our plane trip back is 2 weeks after the end of exams, leaving time for travel.  Since this is probably going to be the last time for a while that I'm going to get to visit Europe, I wanted to go to a few different places.  I didn't have a specific idea of where I wanted to go other than that I wanted to visit areas with a lot of great scenery.  

I had heard other friends who were planning on traveling mention that they were using the Eurail pass, a travel ticket sold to people from outside the European Union, specially geared to people doing a lot of traveling in a short amount of time. Options for the pass range from travel within one country for only 3 days to unlimited transportation in the EU for 3 months.

After looking through the options for a while, I settled on the 5 day, 4 country pass.  The days did not have to be consecutive, and on those days I was allowed to travel as much as I wanted within Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Benelux (since the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg are pretty small, they are treated as one country). Having decided upon which countries I would visit, I then had to decide which cities I visited in those countries, and for the sake of consistency with my other trips,t waited too long to start planning. I would be leaving Monday morning, and so throughout Sunday night grappled with figuring out a good route and deciding which cities would be good.  The decision process primarily consisted of perusing wikitravel(which, by the way, is an awesome sight if you are trying to learn about a city or region), searching on google for "hiking near _____", checking to see if the hostels in the areas weren't exorbitantly expensive, and then searching national railway sites for route times.  I reordered my route several times (finding the most efficient route is an NP-complete problem, after all), and, as the sun rose Monday morning finally figured everything out.  

The route I would be taking. Google maps pegs this route at over 3,000 kilometers.