20 days!!!

Obviously if your reading this you know i'm going on a trip this summer..but did you know I'm leaving in just 20 short days! I did not realize how fast the first half of my summer was going to fly by and how quickly this trip would sneak up on me. While I'm surprised on how soon I'm leaving, we have been planning and talking about this trip for over a year now!

Flights are booked, accommodations are set and my backpack is bought! Now I just have the most dreaded part of any trip, the packing! Since we are taking some country to country flights everything has to fit in "a carry-on" sized bag. At first I thought that would legit be the size of my school backpack, but I have been happy to find that a "small" hiking backpack will work as the dimensions of a cary on are 55x 40x 20cm. While this sounds big enough when I think of how much I pack for a weekend away I'm feeling very limited in what I can bring. Especially because we are doing both the UK (where it apparently rains all the time), and Southern Europe (where it was 26 today, in early June) so my wardrobe must be quite flexible. If you have any packing tips I would love to hear them!

They say with any blog you should have a purpose of why you are writing the blog, and obviously the biggest reason is to share my trip with all of you back home. I also need to write everything so that I can remember it, I have this chronic problem of going on these amazing trips and then forgetting many of the great stories and experiences I have, so when it comes time for me to remember these 49 days I want to have something to go back to. This is my first big trip I have taken, and this is the only trip I have ever taken without my parents and I know I'm going to learn a lot of lessons (and probably also make a few mistakes..), so I want to keep track so I have tips for other travelers and so I can learn from my experiences for future trips. Lastly I'm hoping to sprinkle this blog with some great quotes and sayings I hear along the way!

49 days, 11 countries, and 4 cousins for the trip of a life time!

"A traveler without observation is a bird without wings".
Moslih Eddin Saadi