We have been on our journey for a full month now. Five countries, 625,000 steps and three airplanes.

At the two-week point we started to get a bit tired as that is usually the point we go home, but when you leave your job and everything behind, you had better be gone for more than two weeks. The feeling lasted a day and we made some itinerary adjustments for more hiking, fewer monuments and less time in Italy where it always seems to be 95 degrees or pouring rain.

My favorite days have been spent in nature. Icelandic waterfall hikes, Giant’s Causeway, Cliffs of Moher, Arthur’s Seat, and the Swiss Alps have been the most enjoyable. The long hikes are exhausting and good to space out, bit too many days of museums and monuments are even more draining. We have one more mountain a head of us before a week of beaches in the South of France.

Aaron loves the beach. He could spend all day swimming and sleeping in the sun, but I turn into a lobster after two hours with full sunblock. We may have to have split itineraries for a few days.

This first month will likely be the most expensive of the tour as we began with expensive countries in the high tourism season of August. We also are ahead of schedule as we have shaved off a few cities due to changing priorities and Switzerland being too expensive for much travel. Since we need to keep the seasons in mind, we will either slow down significantly in Spain, or more likely, add another country before Nepal. Probably Greece.

These past few days have been restful for us. Strasbourg, France is charming and beautiful, but we didn’t have a ‘must-see’ checklist dictating our itinerary. Instead, we wandered the canals, read in the park, napped, and planned out the next few cities.

We had three days of peace before a miserable 15 hour journey to Geneva.Most our transportation has been simple, but yesterday was just awful. We left our Airbnb at 5:30am to catch our 6:30 bus, but it never came. We waited two hours and then booked another set of buses to get us to Geneva. These also had layovers with additional delays. We arrived during a lightning and thunder storm that produced no rain. That part was pretty cool. We spent the morning wandering the shores of Lake Geneva and now we are on our way to Chamonix to hike the French Alps.

Our first stop by the flower clock showed the meticulous gardening required for the upkeep.