Update/Recap on My Journey

By popular demand - meaning Brett's suggestion - here is a recap of my trip so far and my tentative plan for the last 1.5 months.

I will list out the cities and countries in order of my travels and time spent there....roughly the time spent there, excuse errors, I am not looking at a calendar for it.

Trip 1
Rome, Italy (4 days)
Florence, Italy (2 days)
San Giminano, Italy (1 day)
Sienna, Italy (1 day)
Florence, Italy (2 days)
Bologna, Italy (1 day)

Trip 2
Budapest, Hungary (7 days)
Vienna, Austria (3 days)

Trip 3
Stockholm, Sweden (5 days)
Copenhagen, Denmark (4 days)
Hamburg, Germany (3 days)
Breda, Netherlands (3 days)
Rotterdam, Netherlands (1 day)
Amsterdam, Netherlands (3 days)
Brussels, Belgium (2 days)

Trip 4
Budapest, Hungary (6 days)
Nyiregyhaza, Hungary (2 days)
Budapest, Hungary (4 days)

Trip 5
London, England (4 days) +Stonehenge
Lavenham, England (1/2 day)
Bury St. Edmund, England (2 days)
Cambridge, England (1/2 day)
London, England (1 day)
Edinburgh, Scotland (4 days)
Scottish Highlands (1/2 day)
Glasgow, Scotland (1 day)
Dublin, Ireland (4 days)
Western Ireland (1 day)
Paris, France (4 days)

Trip 6
Budapest, Hungary (5 days)

Trip 7
Munich, Germany (2 days)
Ravensburg, Germany (3 days) + Neuschwanstein Castle
Tubingen, Germany (1 day)

Trip 8
Budapest, Hungary (here now).

I am in Budapest until the 16th of December, when I go to Istanbul, Turkey for 7 days. During my time here in Budapest, I will travel around Hungary a little. I will hopefully go visit Bratislava, Slovakia and Prague if I can.

Then I will travel to Frankfurt, Germany to spend Christmas with the Shaw family. Then back to Budapest on the 28th of December. I will wait here for friends and family for Matt and Edit's wedding. I will act as a tour guide. Then we have the wedding on January 7th. Then to Zurich, Switzerland on January 10th and back to Kansas Jan. 12th.

It is a weird feeling. Part of me feels like I just started my journey, while the other part feels like I have never lived outside Europe. I have grown and changed as a person here. I have struggled to figure out who I am and who I want to be and how to get there. I have confronted so many of my inner demons. Some battles lost and others won.

Matt Shaw asked me this question when I got here, "Do you feel like Europe is normal and the United States is a fantasy land that you can't really picture fully yet?" At first I told him no and I didn't get it. Then one day I realized I felt so comfortable in Europe, I felt at home. Even though I was seeing new and amazing things every day, it didn't seem weird or foreign, it felt real. Then I tried to imagine Kansas and the United States and it felt unreal. Kind of like thinking about a cartoon. You can remember it, but only certain details, as if the little things have no definition at all....it was just a fantasy land. Now I understood what Matt meant.

Either way, the Tom that left Kansas is not the Tom that is coming back, but I am who I want to be. I feel like I have not only found my path and embraced it, but taken control of it and am ready to drive it forward. In short, I am happy again, but this time the happiness won't leave me because it is not based on anyone other than myself.