We arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland after an 8 hour bus ride through the night from London. 50mg of Benadryl had no effect on either of us so we arrived quite sluggish and wishing we had somewhere to lay our heads. Our backpacks weren’t getting any lighter so we say for breakfast and quickly devised a plan for the next 21 hours. First stop was the Edinburgh museum where we could store our bags for free! We quickly realized Edinburgh is more welcoming to large backpacks than London and we were on our way. I fell in love with Edinburgh. Gothic architecture towers over the city that can easily be taken by foot- the largest of the buildings being the Edinburgh castle. In round about ten minutes up the northwest end of the city the landscape drastically changes to bright green rolling hills and further still the Atlantic ocean. Surreal. We climbed 287 steps to the top of the Scott monument erected in 1840 as a tribute to sir Walter Scott for another breathtaking view. Finally we decided our time and dollars would best be spent on a free tour hosted by NewEurope. Four hours later we had been introduced to the rich and outright cruel history of Edinburgh. Our tour guide Stephen had the entire group in hysteria as his interpretations and very dramatic replications of history stopped many in the streets. Arriving at the end of our tour we joined Stephen for some famous Scottish Haggis at a local pub. Haggis is like a hot dog…a food you want to eat and never know the contents, but ill share them with you anyway: sheep ‘pluck’ which consists of the liver, lungs and heart as well as some other items simmered for 3 hours in the animal’s stomach. Gross…I didn’t think it tasted much better than how it sounds either. As exhausted as we were at this point we were anxious to arrive at our hostel and get to bed early. Our train to Aberdeen was to leave the next morning at 0530. As many of you have already witnessed a large man from Liverpool and another young buck from Romania had very different ideas as to how the evening and wee hours of the morning would play out, which left Micah and I crunched in one twin bunk bed (heaven help me if I was sleeping alone in those surroundings) for another sleepless night.

Denver Manhattan Mount Vernon Chicago.

We are finally at a location with consistent Internet, so I’ve decided to play a little catch up about our journey thus far from sunny Denver around the world. That was an extremely boring sentence and I apologize.

We headed from Denver after our first round of goodbyes to Manhattan, KS with Lance and Colleen to celebrate the life of my grandpa. He passed the week before, and Meghan and had planned on visiting him, but instead we ran around with my folks, visiting some of the places that were most important to him, my grandma, and my mom and dad. He was a wonderful man, and I’m happy that I was able to at least spend some time celebrating his life before leaving the country. He said on his 90th birthday that one of his greatest days of his life was watching the royals win the world series, and that comment made that day one of the best days of my life.

After a second round of goodbyes, we headed to Mt Vernon, OH (not the residence of George Washington…) to visit Meg’s family for a couple weeks. Her sister Katie was in town and she brought her 4 month old, Wyatt, with her as well. We were able to see her mom, dad, and sisters Kristen, Katie, Jenni, as well as their adorable kids Gaby and Xavier. I’ll admit that I’ve not even thought about having kids until I spent these two weeks with those kids…but before I knew it I was talking in one of those baby voices that I’ve always heard with disdain and lambasted under my breath. Made a hypocrite by a tiny human wearing a pink bow.

We drove from there also to visit a couple of Meghan’s close friends—-Emily and her husband Jose, Mel and her husband Brent, as well as her college buddy Brian. We spent one afternoon at a dog festival without Gracie, which was overwhelmingly sad, but we packed enough dog festival shwag to send a care package from Ohio. She knows.

After our third round of goodbyes (Meg’s mom and dad), we left to Chicago from Haley and Ryan Crecco’s house (after our fourth round of goodbyes) outside of cleveland . The Crecco’s are friends of the family and they were extremely hospital, putting meg and i up for a couple nights and humoring me by playing innumerable sporcle quizzes about asinine topics for a number of hours after the kids went off to dreamland. We left from there with Kristen and her boyfriend Harley to Chicago.

I learned two important things from the two week adventure from Denver to Ohio: (1) I have the ability to talk in a dreadful baby voice if there is a child cute enough, which makes me uncomfortable, (2) saying goodbye to very loved people 5 times in a span of 2 weeks is terribly exhausting, and (3) people, family especially, are my favorite.

After loading up the vehicle, we headed off towards New Gotham. Hoping to see batman in Millennium Park, we cruised down the ridiculous highways of Ohio and India(na), paying over 30 bucks in tolls along the way. Don’t taxes pay for roads? Crazy. We arrived in Frank Sinatra’s kind of town around 4:30 and headed into town to grab a deep dish and see the jazz festival in the park. The City the Works is a gorgeous city, and we sent the better part of the night walking around gingerly, snapping photos by the work known as the Bean, which we thought were quite creative but were likely to have a likeness to the likes of like every photo ever taken there.

Meghan and I just got engaged on the summit of St. Mary’s Glacier.