Countdown to Europe

Meandering in Italy

There are less than 3 months to go before we leave for our six to nine month trip in Europe! It will be the longest we have ever been outside of Oregon, where both Devlin and I were born. As the countdown begins to our flight on October 15, we have begun to focus more and more on purging the house of our belongings, and we are dispersing them back into the world via cragislist, storage at my mom's house in Bend, and long-term loans to friends.

The overall premise of our trip is simple: to spend as much time as we can now, while we are young, whole, and hearty, in travels around the world and encounters with new cultures. Our goals are to WWOOF as we travel the world, and couchsurf when we aren't WWOOFing, as a way to keep our costs to a minimum and also to meet as many new wonderful people as possible. WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which means we will work on a variety of farms in exchange for room and board.

Couchsurfing is a community network of free places to spend the night all over the world, but its focus is not just on a "free spot to crash" but on an intercultural exchange with the host. We have hosted a number of people in our home, and we met some wonderful people when we couchsurfed in Europe last year.

This year, we will return to one of the places we 'surfed: a little town called Parrano, where we met a wonderful woman named Giovanna. We will return to her beautiful home to help with the olive harvest in early November.

Parrano - a tiny village in Italy. We return there in October to harvest olives!

 Who knows what other experiences will occur! We could be harvesting citrus in Sicily by January, or herding goats, or with luck, learning to make buffalo mozzarella. Daydreams aside - I'll go pack another box.