Lou Ann's EuroBlog

"A traveller without knowledge is a bird without wings."
- Sa'di, Gulistan (1258)

I've just started a book that I really like already. Early in the introduction, the author has this quote by James Pope-Hennessy: "if one is to get best value out of places visited, some skeletal knowledge of their history is necessary. ..... Sight-seeing is by no means the only object of a journey, but it is as unintelligent as it is lazy not to equip ourselves to understand the sights we see."

Now, many of you know me as ultra-type-A and probably have no problem imagining that I like to plan a lot before I go on a trip. In fact, most of my planning involves reading about the places I'll be visiting and learning as much about them as I can before I go ... keeping in mind that the truly invaluable things I'll learn will happen while I'm actually AT the place. That way, when I get to wherever, my new learnings will have context. (It's all about context, right?) Believe it or not ... once I arrive at my destination (and, often times, like when I road trip, the journey IS the destination) I usually don't have something set in my mind as far as what to do ... I'm rather "go with the flow" about it. My philosophy is always that if I am as well-versed about my tourist options before I arrive at the place, I'll have lots of things to choose from once I'm there. (And I make as few reservations as possible when I'm travelling in the United States!)

Therefore, I just want to point out that these several weeks (months?) before leaving for Europe have been and continue to be full of reading and learning about the places I'll be visiting. In fact, I'm having trouble focusing on important things like airplane reservations and train schedules and rental cars ... because I'm busy reading about the caves at Lascaux, or trying to find out about the island on which Copenhagen sits. It will definitely all come together ... but I wanted to give you a bit of a shade of what I'm doing at this point.

Twelve days and counting!!