August 28, 2014 marked one full month on the road for us. It’s been a busy month and I can’t believe how much we’ve done and how many places we’ve seen in such a short amount of time.

More than anything, I can’t believe how alive we feel again! Before we left for this trip, we were just going through the motions, working for the weekends. We were alive, but not really living. Looking back over the last month, we are now living. We let our guards down, met new people and tried new foods. We are beyond excited for what’s to come. Here’s a snapshot of month #1 of our RTW adventure:

STATS

We’ve done a lot of moving around since we landed in Dublin on July 28.

# of countries: 7 – Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Ireland, Spain

# of cities: 10 – Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick, Paris, Prague, Vienna

# of beds: 12 – Mainly AirBnB, but some hotels where points allowed!

# of flights: 5 – Ryanair, Vueling

# of trains: 1 – MAV – Start (Hungarian Railways) – Budapest to Prague

# of buses: 1 – Czech-Transport – Prague to Vienna

Here are a some of our favourites over the last month:

Favourite city

Jess: Paris. Hands down. Although it was my second time there, I could come back to Paris a million times and still not see everything. It was also a lot of fun to put all of those years of studying french to use again. A tie for second would be Brussels / Prague. Both have so much history, and are definitely on my list of places to come back and see again! Steven: The home of the Eiffel Tower. I could have spent the entire trip there. The view and the atmosphere doesn’t get old.

Favourite meal

Jess: Prague is my favourite city for food to date. I had my best meal in Prague at Vidličky a nože, a delicious striploin steak and roasted potatoes with garlic and bacon and for a pretty reasonable price (only $12 CDN!). It was so good, we went back a second time. I’ve also tried roasted boar and more goulash (with gluten-free dumplings!) and it’s all been very tasty.

Steven: My favourite meal was a yellow thai chicken curry, from a thai restaurant in Budapest, Buddha Express.  It was also one of my cheapest meals.  I wasn’t big on the goulash and dumplings of Hungary and Czech!

Favourite memory

Jess: I have too many, and it’s only been a month! What I’m starting to realize though, is that the memories that I cherish the most are more about the people that we meet and spend time with than the things we see. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve seen a lot of cool things in the last few weeks and have done some pretty cool tours, but it’s time with family under the Eiffel Tower, nights hanging out with our Airbnb hosts and coffee with random strangers that we meet by chance that I will remember most from this trip.

Steven: Gaining an appreciation and better understanding of the not so pleasant history of Eastern Europe and its impact on the people and culture. A close second would be walking around the corner after emerging from Trocadéro metro station in Paris and catching our first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.

Thanks to everyone for reading our blog!  Please leave comments if there are things you would like to see more of. jess + trickett