Sheer, agonizing misery only begins to explain our experience on the overnight train from Venice to Munich. I had booked us for 2 seats assuming that we'd have two seats in a main compartment, airplane style. No, not the case! Gina shot me death eyes when we found our seats- 2 of the 6 in a cozy little 'couchette' compartment- a teeny, tiny, very intimate little box which you share, for long amounts of time, with total strangers. These can become particularly awk...

Our incredible luck with the weather throughout our Europe jaunt reached an end the next morning. We had purposely chosen a hotel close to the airport and on the bus line, but we still ended up absolutely worked in attempts to get to our rental car. The series of events unfolded like this: For starters, it was positively pissing down rain. Next, we saw our bus go by just as we stepped out of the hotel meaning the longest possible wait. Third, we waited at what w...

4am arrived extremely quickly, not too surprising when you get to bed only 3 hours earlier. But up and at 'em were the three of us, as we had a 5am, 5.5 hour bus ride taking us from Pula, Croatia to Venice, Italy. The ride was relatively uneventful aside from the stunning scenery racing past our windows as the Croatian sky melted away from a dark grey, to silver, to orangish-pink, and finally into the light blue of early morning. By 10:30 we had arrived in Veni...

The plan was to get the car back by noon and hop the 12:15 shuttle back into town to get a bus up into Italy, or at least Slovenia to make the next day's trip into Venice a shorter one. As usually happens to me, getting gas before returning a rental car proved to be a huge pain in the ass. We ended up taking 2 additional trips on the toll road and putting another 15 km on the car just to get gas, plus the additional time made us late to return the car and so we m...

What renting bikes is to exploring a city, namely: by far the best way to do it; renting a car is to exploring a country. There is something extremely liberating about shedding the shackles of trains and buses and being free to go where you want and when you want. We headed north unsure of exactly where we were headed, but quite happy just to hit the road and see where we ended up. A few wrong turns took us up to a nameless, but beautiful, little town on a hill s...