Ember Travels

After the Luis and Maria saga, Ilmer and I decided we were definitely hooked on hitchhiking. If anything, I was just getting Ilmer prepared for his world hitchhiking adventure! I had been planning to head to Spain for quite awhile now, but Ilmer somehow convinced me to spend another weekend in Portugal with the promise of showing me around the Algarve, the southern-most state of the country. He was headed there to visit his brother and sister-in-law for the weekend, and it didn't take much for me to agree to the detour.  In our adventuresome style, we decided yet again to try our luck with hitchhiking. It was a three hour trip to the Algarve, so we got into hitchhiking position early Friday evening.  This time we were well prepared with Ilmer's sphisticated hitchhiking kit. Our plan of attack was for Ilmer to hold the "South" sign and I was in charge of the "It's my birthday" sign. We figured the passerbys would enjoy a little hitchhiking humor.  We sh...

A few weeks ago I began to get bored with my normal travel routine. Bus-plane-hostel-tram-tour-plane was beginning to get tedious and a little too comfortable. I was seeing quite a bit, but felt like an important cultural element of my traveling was lacking. On the first day I met Ilmer, he told me of his plans to hitchhike around the world in a year, and right then I knew we would be great friends. Tuesday was a public holiday and Ilmer didn´t have to work, so we decided to check out a natural park nearby and try our hand, or rather thumbs at hitchhiking. We took the train from Lisbon to Setúbal, and steaked out a promising spot along the road leading into the park  for our hitchhiking endeavors. We stood on the corner for 40 minutes with our two fold "Arrábida," sign watching car after car passby, I was beginning to get impatient. Ilmer said that if you juggle flaming batons or you write something like, "I don´t smell" or "it´s my birthday" on the sign, ...

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...

...is the nickname that Portugal has adopted. The country is well known for its gorgeous beaches, warm weather and laid back culture. Unfortunately, I have not been so lucky with the weather, but on the exceptional nice days here, I have been exploring towns outside of Lisbon. I reached a point where traveling from big city to big city was tiring and they all seemed to meld together, so I decided it was time to get away from the cities and check out nature. On Monday I took the train 30 minutes southwest of Lisbon to visit my friend Eva in Cascais. The entire ride along the coast was gorgeous, imagine PHC from Big Sur to Carmel, I was mesmorized by the sight and slipped completly back into California mode. Not a bad thing at all considering I was a little homesick for the Golden State. When I reached Cascais it was love at first sight. It was strikingly similar to Ventura, a small  town situated on miles of coast with green rolling hills in the backdrop. The Sou...

My first day in Portugal was culture shock. Coming from the Netherlands where everything is orderly into semi-chaotic Lisbon was definitely something I had not prepared for. By the end of my first day in Lisbon I was ready to pack my bags and get as far away from Portugal as possible.  I'm not sure what I expected Lisbon to be like, but as I spent a whole day traipsing in the pouring rain through a city full of decrepit buildings and graffitied alleyways, I knew this was a far cry from the "California of Europe" I had conjured up. By the end of my I-hate-Portugal-day, I was desperate to figure something out. There happened to be a weekly CouchSurfing meeting that night, so I decided to stop by. I met a lot of local Portuguese along with some foreigners living in Portugal. They gave me tips of what to see, offered me a place to stay and even invited me on a road trip to a small town north of Lisbon for the weekend. The city might be different from expected, but the locals ...

Here is an interesting bit of trivia for you: the xxx symbol that you see in, well, “exotic” shops is actually derived from Amsterdam. “XXX” has been the logo for Amsterdam ever since the city was established, and it is still everywhere! At first I was a little worried and thought the city must be way too proud of its red light district, until I got my facts straight. The police uniforms are printed with xxx, its on all the local busses and the Amsterdam flag is black and red striped with the xxx logo. Amusing. The Netherlands was never on my list of places to go, until every traveller I met kept telling me how it was their favorite city (and usually for more reasons than just smoking pot). I also made a Dutch friend in Croatia who told me all about his city and how everyone rode bikes everywhere. Despite my reluctance to spend time in Western Europe, I figured that if  Amsterdam was as great as it sounded and I could ride a bike everywhere, I might be sold on the idea. Ruud picked...

There are only a few things in my life that I’ve seen that are completely mind blowing. If I were to make a list of Ember’s Wonders of the World, Xilitla, Mexico would be number one and Petrodvortes would be number two.  Alex and I made the trek outside of the city on a whim. Mike had to leave early in the morning for a trip to Finland and mentioned in passing that there was a cool palace with some fountains that we could check out if we had time. I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular, heck, I wasn’t even expecting that we would actually make it to the palace (the directions seemed a bit confusing) but since we had time to kill and were looking for adventure, we threw the Lonely Planet guidebook in the backpack and jumped the metro. My apprehensions about making it to Petrodvortes were soon pushed aside. We make a sign in Cyrillic that read, “Petrodvortes” and everything else was a piece of cake. Of course no one spoke English, but at least they could point us in the right direct...