a looooong over due update

Sorry it's taken me so long to post about my trip! I'm not really sure where the past four weeks have gone....
Anyways, my trip has been going great so far! Naomi and James took a week off work to show me around England. We hit Cambridge, London, southern England (Bournemouth area), a little town in Wales called Hay-on-Wye and some other local areas. You've probably heard that this summer has been England's wettest summer in about a century so we'd sit down every evening to find out where it was supposed to be sunny the next day (or at least, not pouring!) and then head there.

Other than the rain, I really have been enjoying England. It's neat to see the mixture of history and modern. We went to Nottingham for a day and had lunch at a pub that's been around since the turn of the first century--kind of crazy to think that people have been eating there for a thousand years!

Another part of my trip has been the whole fiasco with my luggage. It got lost in Toronto, but I was told to sort it out once I got to England. Fine, no problem--these things happen and I had a couple of sets of clothes in my carry on. Well, my one bag arrived the next day but the other one still couldn't be located. On the Saturday after I arrived, we got a call from some person up in northern England. His friend, who is dying of cancer and had headed up to northern England to put things in order, had accidentally picked up my suitcase at the railway station in Manchester. What it was doing at a railway station will forever be a mystery, I guess, but the long and short of it is: US Airways says that they're not liable because it was taken out of the airport (although they did say I might be able to be reimbursed for some of the things I had to buy--we'll see if that actually happens) and I still haven't gotten my luggage back because the lady who is bringing it to me won't arrive in this part of the country until Aug. 15. My mom was able to send some stuff with my friend who came to meet up with me, so that worked out, but I shall be QUITE happy to see my stuff again!

A friend from church, Vanessa, came out to meet me here as well and then we went backpacking through France and Italy. We went to Paris first, which I actually wasn't as impressed with as I thought I'd be--maybe it was because we were there in high season and there were just too many people. Still, I saw the sights and got my pictures. I did find the people to be quite friendly, though--contrary to what you hear. Vanessa speaks French, though, so that might have had something to do with it.

Next we headed to Lyon and stayed in a hostel in the old part of town--absolutely beautiful! We had to hike up a VERY steep hill to get to the hostel and the bathrooms were a little sketchy, but the view from the hostel was amazing! Unfortunately, we didn't get a whole lot of time in Lyon because we got stuck in Paris train station for 6 hours with ticket problems (we should have booked in advance)--but you live and you learn, eh?

From there we headed off to Arles in southern France. I loved it here and would love to come back for a longer stretch of time. I really enjoyed meeting up with all sorts of people at the hostels. At Arles in particular, we met up with Paula, a 50-ish year old American lady who's lived in Sweden for the past 20 years. We went around the market with her and had a picnic by the river. It was nice to be mothered a little bit for a few hours! We also went to a Bull Run in Fontveille, a small town just outside of Arles. It's the French style of the bull fight, I guess, where they don't actually kill the bull. There were 5 guys in the middle who were trying to get a ribbon off of the top of the bull's head.

Then it was off to Cinque Terre in Italy. If you ever go to Italy, go there! It was absolutely beautiful! Cinque Terre is five little towns along the northwest shore of Italy that are joined by pathways. We spent one day hiking them (and of course, at each village, we HAD to stop for gelati!) and the next day we went to explore the different towns. Our hostel was in Manarola--the fourth village down, and one of the smaller ones. It was great!

From there we went to Verona. There's a huge Roman arena in the middle of the town and they have operas in the evenings. We went to see the Barber of Seville and it was great--until the thunder storm started! They postponed it for about an hour, then started it back up. After 20 minutes, though, it started to drizzle again, so they stopped it again so as to not damage the instruments. By then it was almost midnight and the opera wasn't even half done--and we had to get up early to head to Venice, so we just ended up leaving. It was too bad, but at least we got a bit of the experience.

Venice was sooo neat! It didn't start out the greatest because our accommodations got messed up. Because I complained about that, though, we ended up meeting a fellow Canadian (who was also having accommodation problems) and ended up exploring Venice with him. It's neat to look back and see how things that we might see as annoyances, frustrations or disruptions God actually uses to bring greater blessings than we would have received if everything had gone as WE'D have planned.

And that, in a nutshell, is my trip thus far. On Friday James and Naomi are going to take me up to northern England, to the Lake District and from there I'll be heading home. It's been a bit of a whirlwind but I think I've been bitten by the travel bug! Meeting people in the hostels from eastern Europe, especially, has got me thinking about more places I'd like to see.....:)