Wednesday, Aug. 04, 2010

Road trip

Yeah, Athens sounds about right - or the Aegian Islands, maybe, or the monasteries of Meteora. The thing is, I don't know quite where I'll be when this newspaper lands in your driveway.

But if it's Johnston County, then something has no doubt gone wrong. On July 31, three days from the day I'm writing this, my friend Logan and I leave for a six-week ramble through the Balkans, Turkey and Central Europe.

Amazingly enough, this will be the first time I've left Johnston County for more than a week since I first joined The Herald in January 2009. And thanks to my generous and gracious bosses and coworkers, I'll still have my job when I return.

To be honest, leaving a newspaper job unattended in this climate kind of feels like an invitation for unemployment - but foreign lands and their foreign beers await.

Our trip will take us to some classic sites, like the Acropolis in Athens, and remote towns whose names I can hardly pronounce.

Soon enough, I suspect, I'll be trying to make sense of rural road signs in Bulgaria. Many places on our journey still make heavy use of the Cyrillic alphabet - I'm actually looking forward to staring at words I can't begin to pronounce.

Some Cyrillic letters are the same as our Latin letters, some are nothing like ours, and some, cleverly, look just like ours but have a completely different pronunciation. I think people the world over are much the same, but to see such a large difference in the most basic of things is exciting and intriguing.

Hopefully, we'll be able to make our way with lots of finger-pointing and gesturing.

For many of our 40-odd nights, we plan to crash on locals' couches we found through CouchSurfing.org, a website where people offer travelers places to stay. I realize this sounds somewhat insane, but I'm pretty confident. I've hosted CouchSurfers in my college apartment before, and Logan has used the service in Western Europe. It's a great way to meet foreign strangers, and who doesn't want to do that?

We have hosts set up in Athens, Greece; in Samsun, Turkey; and in Brasov, Romania, so far - actually, that's all we've arranged. We know where we're going but not where we're sleeping.

Our overall plan is to travel from Athens to Turkey, then to Bulgaria and Romania. After that, down through Serbia into Montenegro, where we'll camp and visit the Bay of Kotor, where the mountains plunge into the water. Finally, we make stops in Austria and the Czech Republic before ending our trip in Berlin.

All of that might change, since our train passes can take us to quite a few countries. Actually, I think our itinerary has more holes than substance.

That's kind of the point, though - is it even possible to avoid having fun with train tickets, a best friend and six weeks to spare in completely foreign lands?

Well, I suppose it is, but let's not worry about that.

So, Johnston County, that's my plan - my vague, under informed plan. If you have tips, tricks or suggested destinations, kindly e-mail me at the address listed below. And if I haven't said it enough, to my co-workers and bosses, THANK YOU.