Brussels or Bust: Day 1

Thursday, September 3rd

The first leg of the trip is 5-hour flight from Portland to Dulles followed by a 7.5-hour flight to Brussels, Belgium. We'll arrive tomorrow (Friday) at 7:30am. For future reference, Belgium and Germany are on Central European Summer Time, or CEST, which is 6 hours ahead of Eastern Time Zone, and 9 hours ahead of Pacific Time Zone. Since it will only be 10:30pm on my body's clock, I may have to start the trip off with a breakfast beer.

I have taken all necessary actions to ensure that we have WiFi/internet access while we're gallivanting across Belgium and Germany, but realized that blogging in any substantial way is impossible for two reasons: 1) we are only bringing along an iPod touch for reliable internet access, which is not exactly ideal for typing; and 2) I am pretty sure I'd much rather spend my time sipping a Dunkelweizen or nibbling on mussels and fries than fussing with Blogger and html code. So, I've managed to put together a few canned blog posts to help you follow along in our follies.** This was a particularly helpful task in planning my own itinerary. It forced me to learn about our destinations and have a pretty good idea of where we'd be on any particular day of the week.

As a side note, the travel blogging and general planning wouldn't have been possible had I been working, so a quick moment for our organizational sponsors: Oregon's 12% unemployment rate, please take a bow.

The things you can expect to find in my upcoming posts are general time lines and destinations, any important facts/history that I deem interesting, and rudimentary maps (expertly edited in Paintbrush) to show our general travel path and location. Also, the posts will be filled with images pilfered from the internet, because I don't think I'll be able to upload any of my own in a reasonable amount of time.

Initial trip highlight predictions: Delicious sausage and cabbage, hopefully bicycling, castles, general medieval wonders, splendid natural scenes, and of course beer coupled with mild intoxication -- on life, of course.

** I will try to comment real-time as often as possible, but you can reliably know where we are by individual entries. I won't post until we get there (this is mostly for the Moms so they can sleep at night knowing we're on track and safe).