Ember Travels

Good morning/good afternoon/buen dia where ever you are in the world! It is a lovely Tuesday morning in Sevilla, Spain and this marks the two month aniversary of my journey! I want to thank all of you, who I know and don`t know for your comments, messages and endless enthusasium for my travels. Your support has been amazing and it´s always nice to hear from a familiar face! A little bit about my travels...I am excited to be in a country where I  finally  speak the language! I arrived in Spain yesterday and plan to spend a few days in Sevilla, then head to Grenada where I can hopefully find a place to settle down for a month or so to practice my Spanish and meet some locals. Keep your fingers crossed, I´m not sure how the whole, "I want to rent a room for just a month" thing will go, but things always seem to work out, so I´m not too worried. A friend recently commented on my luck saying that I may actually be the center of the universe, so I´ll just bank on that :) Either way...

If I could have spent a month in Dubrovnik, I would have. It was such a striking city with loads of wonderful travelers and new friends! When the evening came that I had to leave for Split I was quite sad. I hopped on a 6P.M. bus and braced myself for the four hour journey. Most of the drive was along the coast which was lined with hilly islands and small villages. I watched the sun set over the islands for the first hour of the trip and was completely awe-struck. I made the decision then and there that I WOULD return to Croatia at some point during my life and spend a few weeks exploring the islands and small villages and driving the coast. A quarter of the way into the trip, once I had settled into my seat and was enjoying some good old road trip music, I noticed an intensifying smell of burning wood combined with incense wafting into the bus. At first I didn't mind, it jut smelled like a wood burning stove on a crisp winter evening-kind of festive. Eventually, the smell grew str...

I must admit, I am absolutely smitten with Croatia. The more time I spend here, the more attached I become. In America, Western Europe seems to be all the rage. For some reason, we are obsessed with it and tend to forget about the rest of the world when thinking about travel destinations. Any country that's not "first world" or over three hundred years old seems to immediately get crossed off the list. I'm not bashing Western Europe by any means, I believe it's a great place and has a lot of history, I'm just encouraging us to think with an open mind. It has always been a struggle for me to "fight" for Mexico and try to dispel the myths about it when the press is constantly ragging on it. I will continue to advocate Mexico and now Turkey and Croatia, two of my favorite "under dogs." If you like pristine nature, untouched coast lines and deep blue water, Croatia is the place for you. This little country was just established in 1991 when Yugo...

I must admit, one thing Greece has going for it is the ferry system. Apart from the ridiculous and inconvenient schedule, they are always punctual and spend a mere ten minutes at port unloading and reloading semi trucks, cars and passengers before they are on their way again. The Greeks don't mess around and their ferrys mean business, unlike those of Croatia.  On Sunday morning mom and I went to the port in Bari to check the ferry schedule and purchase my ticket to Croatia. The terminal was dead. Note to self: never try to get anything done in Italy on a Sunday because everything is closed.  In addition, every travel agency was closed, so I decided to buy my ticket online but the ferry line forbade me from purchasing my day-of ticket on the Internet. Panic. This was another awesome ferry schedule that only came a few times a week and if I didn't get the Sunday boat, I would have to wait until Wednesday night. Luckily, when we arrived at the port that night, the ticket window ...

I haven't been on top of the time situation, so I hope you're not disappointed by my lack of countdown.  I will be boarding the plane for Istanbul in a few short hours, and I am lucky enough to have my mom joining me on my journey for the first two weeks!  The past month has been full of browsing online travel forums (Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Forum has saved my life many times), getting travel vaccines, memorizing airport codes and vigorously studying world geography.  The last one wasn’t so hard since my shower curtain is a map of the world.  Needless to say my obsession with maps paired with said shower curtain was probably not conducive to saving water.  Now, I have everything necessary to live stuffed into my little backpack and I am ready to embark on my new career as a nomad. When I tell people that I'm traveling the world, I get one of two responses. 1: wow, that's awesome, I've always wanted to do that, I'm jealous! Or (the critical) 2: Is that saf...