Friday Field Trip: The REAL Slight Detour (Part 1)

"Writing, I think, is not apart from living.  Writing is a kind of double living.  The writer experiences everything twice.  Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."  ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957



Hey, campers! Welcome to our Friday field trip! Today we're making a u-turn in time to the backpacking trip that helped inspire Before Ever After. 
This was a spur of the moment adventure that I took with a good friend during a time when we were both sick and tired of our jobs and had just watched the movie Before Sunrise. The film hopelessly infected us with a bad case of wanderlust. We flipped a coin on our lunchbreak to decide whether to take a camel tour of Mongolia or make our way around Europe. (I'll give you one guess which trip won out.) We hopped on a plane without any firm plans other than the fact that we needed to be in Athens on the date printed on our return ticket. 
So, are you ready to see the REAL Slight Detour? Oh, wait. Before we leave, there a few new rules that you need to be aware of:
1.  There will be no laughing about 90s hairstyles or wardrobe choices. 2.  There will be no laughing about 90s hairstyles or wardrobe choices. 3.  There will be no laughing about 90s hairstyles or wardrobe choices. 
Hey, you in the back of the van - I can still hear you snickering!

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, follow the red umbrella!

Remember this picture. This will be the cleanest I will be on the trip.
Can you spot me? I'm the white splotch sitting in front of the decayed tooth, er, Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
In my "Before Sunrise" sundress at Versailles. You will see this dress many (many, many) more times before the tour is over. Don't judge me. ;-)
Hmm. I wonder why Dan Brown didn't include this statue in the Da Vinci Code?

Or this one?
Luckily, unlike my main character, Shelley, I didn't have to race up the more than two hundred steps to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica to take this photo.
I was young.
Notre Dame required a more dignified pose.
The bridge in the background is where we spent a homeless night in Lucerne when we got kicked out of the train station when it closed for the day.
Meet our guide. We met him when we arrived in Austria and joined "Bob's Bavarian Mountain Tour." He offered to take us around Austria in his dad's convertible, but the van he drove had its own charm. (He's standing on the van in this photo - which explains the perspective of the shot. Why he is standing on the van is another story.)


That's all I have for you now, but make sure to come back next week for the second part of the tour!