adios, belongings!

Yesterday, we finished up our humungo purge-all-the-things project at Casa Saratoga. When we went abroad in 2009, Rob's Mom was kind enough to let us basically box up our lives and stash 'em downstairs at her house on the hill. We had a TON of crap, and at the time, I was much more concerned with simply getting stuff out of her way (and getting out of the country!) than with parting with anything, so we amassed something like 50 boxes/bags. When we got back an moved into our little studio apartment, we left like 96% of the stuff there and just kinda started over with the handful of things we wanted or needed.

That crap on the mountain has been an ever-present dull ache of weight on my shoulders. I've been meaning to get up there and purge and better organize it for almost two full years, which is embarrassing at best. With the upcoming move and the hired movers being willing to make stops at two places to pick up our stuff (!), we had no choice but to get crackin'. Since Rob is home for the week, we set aside an entire day to sort out what should be tossed, donated, stored, or shipped... and an entire day it took.

Eight hours of solid work at the house cut our pile o' crap by at least half. We filled the bed of Rob's Mom's pickup truck with a load of donations, and piled up an additional seven boxes + two bags for later drop off. Three huge bags of trash and two boxes of recycling makes me itchy wondering why the hell I even boxed up that stuff in the first place. SO. MANY. THINGS. Things that have no use or personal attachment. Things I swear I didn't actually have. Things I thought were lost for good and that I actually squealed over upon unearthing. But mostly things that we do not need, so off they go to someone who can actually use them.

If I had to guess, I'd say that we've whittled the grand total of our crap (spread between alllll the houses/apartment) to less than 2/3 of what we once had. And I'll probably ditch even more stuff when I'm actually boxing things up, simply because I'm over it. I took a couple pics o' the piles, but no one really cares to see those because they're boring and ugly. So here's a pic of some jumping cats instead:

yay!

note to self:

It's been like pulling teeth to even attempt to think of something witty enough to post, much less on a regular basis. The sky opened up and the sun shone on me today, when this little doozy hit my noggin.

So Summer and her bff Susannah are preparing to embark on their own Euro-adventure (just a few months too late...because God knows I tried to get them to come visit me there. Losers.) and asked my advice on Dublin, Ireland the other day. I droned on and on about what sites rocked and what airlines to avoid, places to check out and sights to skip. An unfortunate coworker nearly lost an ear by asking for tips on what to see in Prague. Elissa also made the minor mistake of making me pine for Greece, so my mind has been in full-blown travel mode. I even said to myself the other day, "Self, you should probably put this in a blog post so you can remember it for the next time you circle the globe (because oh yes, there WILL be a next time...)", so here goes:

AirNinja.com = the. sickest. site. ever. It lets you plug in your dates and cities, and it'll spit out the cheap-o airlines that fly that path, annnnd it'll load the data into Expedia, Orbitz and Kayak for you, so you don't have to type it a hundred times while you comparison shop. Yes, it sounds like it'd take three whopping seconds, but searching those sites on your own takes lots o' time. It saved me time and money...win.

I became very close friends with TripAdvisor.com on this trip. I used the site a TON, and never really disagreed with their recommendations. The site even pointed out things to go do, rather than just where to stay and what to eat. A few pics even helped us find our elusive hostels...

Hostelworld.com rocked too. Their reviews were legit, and we enjoyed most of our hostels (read: not the one in Istanbul).

Avoid RyanAir and Olympic Airlines like the swine flu. Wear a mask if you must. I whole-heartedly recommend spending an extra fifty bucks to go with an airline that doesn't suck ass. Between a 245Euro excess baggage fee to the near-riot getting through the gate (twice) to the hellacious customer service, RyanAir might be the devil in airline form. And Olympic Airlines'll delay your flight and insist that you'll be fine to make your connection, only to offer you a whopping 12Euro in food vouchers when you miss your flight.

Things I could not have lived without on this trip - in no particular order, I swear:

• Rob (my travel guru...he kept me sane and calm when all I wanted to do was lose my shit)
• my money belt (totally dorky, I know, but I didn't have to worry for one second about slimy pickpockets - if you want my stuff, you come and get it bud)
• travel adaptors (duh)
• my camera
• a laptop
  

Things I want to buy before our next trip:

• a better backpack. I'm a funky in-between size and my little kid's pack was too small, but Rob's grown-up pack was too big. Either way, I want a new one.
• this camera. Its like my big Nikon SLR and my point-and-shoot had a baby...perfection.
• other stuff, I'm sure.

This is one of those posts that'll be updated as I think of other things that I'm bound to forget...and since posts are better with pics:

on our way through the US to Europe...soooooo long ago

And yes, I am fully aware that we've been back an entire month and it appears as though I might be a bit hung up on our trip, so gimmee some slack. I was gone for four months, so it'll take me at least four to get over being back...

if I could do it all again...

...there are a few things I'd do differently:

• give ourselves a bit more time in fewer locations
• ensure that our luggage could handle the trip beforehand (it made it, but barely)
• pack less, even though I can victoriously state that I used every single thing in my luggage (save my damn suit, which I didn't want to bring, but Thunderbird made us, so it doesn' t count)
• I'd rock a pedometer, since I'm now curious just how many steps/miles/circumferences of the Earth I walked over four months
• take my computer from the get-go
  

And there's a whole mess of things that I'd be certain I had before leaving the country again (a.k.a. stuff I bought along the way):

• a watch
• waterless anti-bacterial hand sanitizer
• lots of over-the-counter medication (advil, sudafed, the whole nine. you can't get it OTC in Europe...like at all.)
• more undies (whoops)
• my beloved pashmina, possibly the greatest purchase I could have made on the road. I heart that thing.
• more than one power adapter

All in all, I think we did a pretty damn good job of packing and planning. pat-pat-pat (that's us, patting ourselves on the back...hehehe.)