Berlin

We made it safely back to Berlin. It is a beautiful city. Verz (excuse the z and y mix ups) clean and wide open streets. We are very excited for the next few days, we hear they have a lot of beer here. But really, the shopping is really what is exciting us! More later!

Prague

Roma was fantastic. We saw so many amazing things! We went to the colosseum and the Roman forum, the Vatican museum and St. Peter's! There simply was not enough time. We flew into Berlin last night and arrived at, without a doubt, the nicest hostel we've stayed in yet. We then took the train this morning to Prague, which is beautiful and has plenty of jewelry stores (:s)
After this we're back to Berlin for a few days then onwards. We're getting towards only two weeks left! Can't believe it! Tho I certainly have enough pictures to prove all the places we went!
I'm so tired right now, no real sleep since before the game in Athens!

Laundry in Bari

We are currently doing much needed laundry in Bari while waiting for our train that leaves later this afternoon to Rome. We just spent 16 hours on a ferry from Athens to Bari. It was a very annoying and uncomfortable ride. The ferry was full of Milan and Liverpool fans, who were mostly middle-aged drunk, stinky, loud, rude men. As fate would have it, we were assigned seats in an enclosed room with these prize fellows, and we were basically the only females. Well, the early part of the ferry ride was okay, as the majority of our cabin mates were succeeding in killing any of their remaining brain cells in the various bars (it was a very large ferry), and so there was temporarily some peace and quiet. However, their money seemed to run out faster than we had anticipated, and we were once again graced with their presence. I wish the ventilation system had been better and that there had been a mandatory spray-down with Febreeze prior to entrance into the room.
Oh well, it is nice to breath in fresh air again! We are really looking forward to Rome and the Vatican tomorrow...Michelangelo, here we come! We are also excited to get some much needed sleep on our 6 hour train ride today!

Picture explanations

Okie, in order:

1) On beach on Mykonos
2) Same beach on Mykonos
3) More Mykonos
4) Sangria in Barcelona (yikes!)
5) Beach in Nice -- very rocky
6) On the Dome in Florence -- quite a climb!
7) Da Vinci perpetual motion machine (coool!)
8) The Acropolis
9) Huge pictures in Louvre
10) Huge pictures in Louvre
11) Outside the Louvre -- eating lunch
12) Me and Geometry! It's a woman apparently! Hooray!
13) Rachelle and I in the catacombs of Paris
14) Van Gogh in D'Orsay
15) Versailles paintings
16) Versailles
17) Rachelle resorting to canabilisim in the Louvre
18) My fave painting in the louvre
19) Mont. St. Michel
20) More Mont St. Michel
21) Rachelle and I dancing while driving to 'This is Why I'm Hot'
22) American Cemetary in Normandy
23) Caen

Liverpool vs. Milan!!

We're here in Athens for the Champions League Final. The city is awash in red (not many milan fans in sight)
It is amazing how many fans are here, the sea of red shirts, hats, backpacks and just crazy scarfs is amazing. Rachelle and I joke that we'll be easy to find as we're two of five females here wearing the appropriate shirts (out of what, the 50,000 men?)
We had a great time yesterday running around town looking at Liverpool gear, watching crazy singing and then we went out with Chris and his friend Chris and we were out near Syntagama square (where all the Liverpool stuff is) and we were there from about 12:30-2:30 with all these (very drunk) liverpool fans singing (no shoving, no arguing, just singing) It took us another hour to walk back to our hotel (with our two non-liverpool fan, no knowledge of football escorts) with all sorts of liverpool fans singing and cheering.
I've never seen anything like this, it's just insane the way these people love their teams, we're pretty sure people camped out in the square with their flags! We've heard tickets are going 2500 euros in some places, but we met a man last night who got a normally 200 euro ticket for 400 euros, so perhaps there is hope. One can only dream!
The swag is selling like nothing I've ever seen. The Brits drink like fish (we can walk around with open Heinekens everywhere, and let me tell you the square was covered with them!) Yesterday it rained at like 10pm, we arrived at the square (and it's a big square) at 12:30 and the entire square was sticky. How does that happen!??!?!? It's weird to walk by police in riot gear while drinking a beer! But the amount of money flowing into the city (and yes, they're dropping pounds, not euros) is crazy. I'll take plenty of pictures and videos! Watch for us on TSN :P

Photos

Kate and Rachelle asked me to Post these...

So I am!

Naxos

We're safely in Naxos!
Mykonos was soo beautiful. This island is bigger but quieter. There's lots of temples and forts to see!
We're hoping to tour around and just laze the next two or three days so we should have a good time
More to come later!

Pictures? Maybe!!

Trying
Brief amount of time before we go to Paradise Beach on Mykonos!
It's sooo beautiful here! We kind of never want to leave (except we'll have to because the price of sunscreen, which we need sooo badly, will bankrupt us!)
We're really exhausted because we tried to go out last night but none of the bars open until after 2, and then we couldn't go to this one place we wanted to so we ended up in this awful bar where the drinks were 10 euros!!! ouch!
I guess the photos are not working... How sad!
Off to the beach! What a tough life we live!

Athens

We arrived in Athens yesterday, it is so warm! It's beautiful
we're about to head off to the islands this afternoon, there's been a change in our plans which I'll update about when we're not busy busy go go go.
we're going to be in Athens for the Liverpool vs. AC Milan champions league final! Very exciting! Trying to find tickets, but as Angus said, it's like looking for game 7 leaf's tickets!
We saw the acropolis today, it's nuts! Can't believe they were building that stuff 2500 + years ago!
We were in Florence earlier this week, it was awesome! Perfect weather and lots of art! We couldn't believe how much leather they were selling in the market. Before that we were in Nice, it was so beautiful we wish we hadn't had to leave! A day on the beach certainly fixed us after Avignon and all the rain!
That's it for now, hopefully something this week!

Avignon 1

I am trying to upload pictures and failing....
just wanted to let you know.....

Paris 2

French keyboard will cause poorspelling....
Todqy lots was acomplished. went to Notre Dame for mass, then the pantheon, then the catacombs (scary underground graves, never seen so many bones in my life!!!) then the pompidou centre!!! good day of culture and bizzare. Yesterday was the louvre and the arc de triomphe. the size of the louvre will nefver cease to amaze. Went shopping in montmartre tonight, tomorrow is a full day of shopping huzzah!!!!
pictures soon hopefully !

ahhhh France

So, today we went to Versailles...it was amazing! We are sooo sore from walking the grounds!

So, Kate neglected to mention bits about our driving experience. Lesson learned: Don't drive in France...and especially don't drive stick in France, when you haven't driven stick for two years. We had many interesting detours, but I think Caen takes the cake....I'm almost out of internet time at the cafe...but the basically, Kate nearly ran me over...and the door nearly got taken off of the car...but don't worry, the car and I are fine.


Will post more later,

Rachelle
xoxo

Hoooray!!! First trip post!!!

We are in fact alive! It's been a while since I said we would post, but here we are!
We arrived in London at about 9pm on the 23rd, and tried to get into our hostel as quickly as possible. This resulted in some small getting lost :S
We finally made it about 11:30ish to discover a ground floor room with three sleeping girls, no lights and lots of smoking. Our room was right next to the night entrance (booo) and was apparently connected to the building's mouth as it spit about 3L of water out the side of the building at our room every thirty seconds. Not good for sleeping. We slept about 3 hours before we gave up and took the tube, to the chunnel, to the paris metro, to the paris train line to St. Malo to the standard (oh jeez, I haven't driven one in 2 years and the rules are different and I'm jet lagged...) to Mont. St. Michel.
This amounted to about 10hrs of travelling on the 24th.
Mont St. Michel was amazing. Couldn't have asked for a better trip, very beautiful. We spent the 25th driving to different D-day sites across the north of France, my driving improved, but the weather was rainy. We made it into Caen (the most imposible city to navigate) with about only an hour getting lost. Our hotel was fine. Rachelle got me drunk that night :P
Got up the next day, (26th...) and went to William the Conquorer's castle and then returned the car (with 30min getting lost.....argh) and got on the train to Paris. Spent the afternoon (from 3-10) going to d'Orsay and St. Chapelle = good!!!
As you can imagine, very tired today, Rachelle is going to post more details I think. We'll try to make this more regular. Also, we don't have any pictures downloaded, but as soon as we do you'll see them! Hope all is well with everyone, we're having a grand time!
Love to all!

We spent over 6 hours today booking hostels!
We're really lucky that we got all the amazing deals we did. A lot of the hostels were really booked. So we've booked 41/55 days, we're waiting to sort out Geneva and Italy/Greece as there are some ferry misunderstandings. Hopefully that'll get sorted tomorrow.
It seems that we are averaging $30/person/night for the trip, not tooo bad!
:D
I'm particularly excited about the place in Nice, we're ON the beach. It's hot!

In less then three weeks this will start filling up with stories about R&K's adventures in Europe (this time!) Keep an eye out say.....April 27th~ish for some fun stuff from Paris. But for now just updates on planning perhaps...
Finally got europass and car rental for the first week sorted out. Two hours with a travel agent = lots of work!
Bed time now, need to save strength to book things tomorrow!!!