To break up the travel a bit, here’s a post with scribblings written on the bus. They don’t add much to the story, but are nice for me or those who know the people on the tour

First, some stuff written by the lovely crazy Anrie

Dear Tim,

Me, you & An2net are currently on the bus in Germany. Guten Tag!!! You are sleeping again! I jumped out of a plane a few days about! You should have come along but you are a big girl! This has been the time of my life! I’m so glad I’ve got to share it with you cool people, unfortunately I’ll never see any of you again.

Have an amazing life!

Tralala, Auf Wiedersein,
Anrie
P.S. I don’t always write like a crab

Lewe en laat dit lewe!

We are still in the bus. I am soooo bored! The music is not very cool but luckily we are only about an hour out of the Rhine Valley.

Where is the love? An2net is biting you if you didn't notice. On the one hand I just want to go lie in front of the TV for about a week but on the other hand I don't want this tour to end ever!

We just saw a sign that says: "Hollenbrand". It means: bumhole burn. Ha-ha. Tonight we are going winetasting which is cool 'cause I love German wine!

In Amsterdam we are going for a smoke, a pancake & a sex show. What more do you want out of life? I want to get off the bus.



and a little something soppy I wrote

I’m a bit of a sucker for melancholy. We’re on the bus between Prague and Germany, everyone’s sleeping, we’ve got Coldplay going, and I’m spending quality time lying in the lap of a girl I may miss for the rest of my life.

My experience of Roma was initially similar to my experience of Paris – thought it was really dirty and bordering on horrible before getting into the old city and being blown away.
We were too late and too honest to either line up the 3hrs or jump the queue to the Vatican Museum (which includes the Sistine Chapel), so we went to see St Peter’s Cathedral.
St Peter’s is great. The line-up wasn’t that long and it was free to come in and see the entire main area. Inside many great pictures adorn the walls, the roof is lined with golden flowers (no two the same), and there’s a great big monument/altar thing in the middle that is kind of imposing but easy to appreciate and admire.

Two things really stood out about St Peter’s to me. One is how amazingly huge it actually is while at the same time only looking fairly big. In the photo here check out the people at the bottom. See the lower line of writing? Those letters are 2m high according to a tour guide we overheard. It’s easy to see the magnitude of its size from the photo, but when you’re there it all looks so nicely proportioned that your mind considers it cosier than it really is.
The second thing that got me about St Peter’s is that there is not a single painting in the whole cathedral. There are huge pictures on almost every wall, high and low, but every one of them is an intricate mosaic. And they’re amazing – stand a couple of metres back from the rail in front of them and you’d swear they’re painted, but if you lean over the railing you can see they’re actually made up of tiny pieces of coloured rock. It really is astonishing and adds to the overall impression I had of the cathedral: that everything in it is even greater than what you first realise. I think that’s a great sentiment for a church.

Top Deck Coach
Venice -> St Johan, Austria