I’ve always been bad at endings.

It’s been a quiet holiday season for me, especially compared to the chaos of last year.

It took more than three years, but I finally got my residency visa for Portugal.

For almost all of the last week I’ve been serving as crew for College of Wizardry: Echoes of the Past.

It’s been another month of laying low and trying to set some things in motion. If this keeps up much longer this travel blog is in serious danger of turning into a non-travel blog.

I’ll admit, the last year has felt like a lot of effort for very little payoff.

When I first mapped out my autumn travel, I imagined I’d visit at least a little more of Czechia than Prague on this jaunt.

This was supposed to be a pleasant jaunt back to the UK for SOE: Resistance. Instead I’ve yet again ended up in the hospital.

I’m on a flight back to London after attending Stone Soup, another iteration of the “experience design camp” I attended back in 2019, and I don’t have much to add about it from the last time I attended.

I’ve spent the last three weeks rambling around England a bit, prepping myself for a busy September.

I’ve just ended another week on Gotland.

I went back to Lisbon for the week, largely for medical reasons.

I arrived in the United Kingdom near the start of May.

I came back to Berlin for two reasons: to play Shattered Mirrors and to finally stow away all the costumes I’ve been dragging around with me for a month.

I visited Rome many years ago, twice in fact, and I really didn’t care for the city. My mistake, I think, was visiting during the summer. Rome is miserable then.

I knew I had arrived in Tunisia because my bank card stopped working.

Solmukohta is the Finnish edition of the yearly Nordic Larp convention I’ve been attending since 2016. I couldn’t miss it.

I’ve got a number of larps scheduled over the next month, so the last week has just been preparing for them and figuring out what I’m doing for the summer afterwards.

It’s been a rainy Março in Lisbon, not that it’s mattered much to me.

My whole career, I’ve worked in the tech industry.

This is the scary bit. In a couple hours I’ll be boarding a flight from the United Kingdom to Lisbon, and at that point I stop traveling.

I thought I was escaping the worst of winter by spending a week on Gotland. Instead it followed me here.

I’ve always liked the winter.

I’ve always kind of given Bavaria short shrift. This trip is in partial amends of that.

Since September, I’ve been torn between the need to recover from my heart attack and my need to not die from boredom, and I’m still not splitting the difference very well.

Berlin is big into New Year’s Eve, so when I got an invite to spend the holiday there with friends, I jumped at the chance.

It’s almost always a mistake to book a flight ridiculously early in the morning, and having that flight get subsequently canceled is doubly painful.

This has been a domestic month for me, more so than any since I started traveling.

It was a cold day in August 2018 when I boarded a plane to London, the first stop on a long, restless itinerary that’s taken me to the far corners of the map and back.

Reentering the United States is always rough. It was particularly so returning from the first vacation I’ve taken in years.

Cruises are weird.

I’m in the middle of an 11 hour flight to Buenos Aires, which is going to either be the start of an amazing adventure or the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. If I end up dead, it was the latter.

I’ve been cleared to fly. I’m shocked and amazed. And on the train to the Gatwick Airport.

I’m just returning from Goetia, a larp by Omen Star. It was great to see a lot of friends, and further reassuring to know my recent health issues didn’t hamper my game much.

I’ve been standing still for what seems far longer than two weeks.

If you’re wondering, I’m not dead yet.

I finally figured out what my back pain was. It was a heart attack.

These last few days I’ve felt miserable. Still do. I think I’ve just overextended myself on too many fronts.

Travel when you want to be someplace can be a joy. Travel when you have to be someplace rarely is. This trip has been almost entirely the latter.

I was barely in Paris at the citizenM Hotel by the airport, where I killed two nights. I’ve not much to say about the experience but I still think it’s worth talking about how I ended up here.

I’m only visiting Ireland out of spite.

I’m back in Czechia for the second time this year, this time to see a bunch of stuff that wasn’t Prague.

Arriving in Riga, by bus, is dreadful. Luckily that’s the worst part of it.

I’m only in Tallinn for two nights. When I was planning this trip I was expecting to stay longer, but I’ve been here before and the thing I still most want to see is currently closed. So I’m bouncing.

I had a ticket to Oslo and then onward to Helsinki way back in 2020 for Solmukohta, and was preparing to fly out from Thailand when everything was cancelled. In recompense, they gave everyone a free ticket to Ropecon. So I went, to see what all the fuss was about.

Every time I return to England, I’m reminded of how my travels are shaped by the vagaries of history.

Nearly five years ago, I left my home in New York City, packed up or threw out nearly everything I owned, and started traveling.

The last time I was in Hungary, I said the politics put a damper on the experience. If anything, they’ve gotten worse since I was last here in 2019.

Before I talk about Slovakia, let me first talk about the pressures of travel.

I’m finding the longer I travel, the more places I know well enough to not have to think about too hard. It feels like Austria’s now one of those.

I crashed kinda hard in Bulgaria.

I just finished Knudepunkt, the yearly larp convention. Was this the best one I’ve attended? It might have been.

The Faroe Islands are stunning. I don’t think I’ve ever been someplace with so much natural beauty stuffed into such a small area.

I’m barely in Denmark — landed at 10pm, leaving at 8am — so there’s really not much to say.

I don’t get to concerts that much. I don’t get evenings out all that much, honestly.

I was only in New York for the weekend. I tried to make the most of it.

Shakespeare’s birthday is generally assumed to be April 23. And what better way to celebrate it than by visiting Canada?

The best way to tour the Bahamas, I think, is to marry someone who owns a yacht.

The quintessential experience of the United States has got to be the road trip.

It’s been a particularly hectic week, exactly the kind of thing I was trying to avoid when I planned out my travel. Obviously, things went poorly.

I’m currently on a bus to Copenhagen, thoroughly exhausted, after spending a week pretending to be a wizard in Poland.

I’ve been in the United Kingdom, yet again, for what seems like forever.

It’s a relief to get back to Prague.

The first thing I did when I arrived in Israel was leave.

When I landed in Lyon, I thought to myself “Back to civilization” and immediately was embarrassed. But that’s what I felt like.

I was supposed to be visiting Mali. Senegal isn’t Mali. Plans change.

Every so often, I like to write a more philosophical update of how I’m doing, less tied to where I am and more tied to how I am: physically, spiritually, emotionally. And that’s always a hard question to answer.

Morocco is tricky, for me, for a number of reasons.

It’s a relief to be traveling again — really traveling again — and Andalucia has proved to be a nearly perfect place to start with.

I was back in Zagreb to run Triumph, and I did something momentous. I bought a box of cereal.

Visiting a country for the first time is a lot like a blind date.

I was back in the United Kingdom for about two weeks, in what is entirely likely to be my last visit in 2022. I won’t be missing it.

I flew to Norway to play Allegience, a spy larp set during the Cold War. And I still have no idea if the game was any good.

I’m barely in the United Kingdom. I’ve had two days — two nights, really — and then I’m off somewhere else.

I increasingly hate visiting the United States.

I only spent a week in the United Kingdom this time, and this time it was all for fun. Theoretically.

I’ve spent the last week in Linköping for Knutpunkt, the Nordic Larp Convention.

I arrived back in the United Kingdom to run And Then There Were None.

I landed in Zagreb just a few days ago, long enough to conduct a final site visit for Triumph before heading back to the UK to run And Then There Were None in a few all-too-short weeks.

I’m in the middle of an extended trip to England, largely — almost entirely — to prep for the larp I’m running at the end of August. Subsequently, I’ve done nearly nothing of note.

I was apprehensive about visiting Serbia, but I thought I should give it a shot. It ended up being worse than I imagined it would be.

Kraków has, unexpectedly, one of the nicest airports I’ve ever traveled through.

I’ve been more-or-less in Sweden for the past few weeks. It’s got me thinking about the Nordic countries.

I spent the week in Italy, largely to attend The Secrets We Keep, a larp which ran just outside of Florence.

I’m back in Switzerland, for the last of this series of brief stops across Europe.

Another short update, visiting Berlin.

Some trips I play the tourist. Some trips I hide in a room and relax. And some trips — my favorite, truth be told — I visit friends.

I bought a ticket for the Galactic Starcruiser, Disney’s big multi-day immersive experience in the Star Wars universe, so I ended up flying into Miami a little over a week ago.

I really wish train travel was better. It’s just … not.

I’ve spent about a week in England, and just about nothing has gone right.

As travel restrictions lift more and more, for better or ill, I’m finding myself revisiting places I imagined I’d return to years ago. This time it’s Zagreb. I’ve missed it.

France holds a special place in my heart.

In a different world, probably a better one, I’d be on a boat right now.

At the moment, I don’t really exist.

I was only supposed to be in Argentina for about two weeks. Then disaster struck.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how long it takes to feel like you get to know a place.

I knew it was going to be risky traveling during COVID. I just expected to, you know, catch it and get hung up from that.

When I planned this trip through Latin America, I knew even with two months I was only going to be able to see a limited number of countries. Colombia wasn’t going to be one of them.

A year ago I was in Dublin, wholly alone in a dismal, cramped, bleak, cold apartment. I swore to myself I wasn’t putting myself through that again.

This trip to the United States has been a disaster, and if you’ve been wondering why I don’t spend more time in the States, well, this is why.

I’ve spent the last six weeks in the United Kingdom, largely because I ran out of places to go.

I vividly remember vacations growing up with my family.

I left the United States over three years ago. In the very first entry of this travelogue I said I was terrified. It was true. It still is, a bit.

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve been the United States. It’s changed.

In the old days, a handy trick I learned was to just find the cheapest direct flight from Europe to wherever I wanted to go, book it, then take a train or a bus or a flight within Europe for a few days earlier, and I’d get to explore a new city.

Travel during COVID ranges from the annoying but basically normal, to a moderate hassle but doable, to a massive overload of stress. My travel since July has mostly been in the first two categories. But this particular jaunt has been the third.

I’m only in Vienna for a quick stopover over the weekend, to visit a friend before I head up to Norway. These sorts of trips used to be commonplace, but they’re a bit challenging during COVID.

Romania is in a lot of ways like a jigsaw puzzle, with various Voivodes and princelings chopping up and stitching back together the country over centuries, and it still bears those marks today.

Somehow, in the middle of a stressful week geopolitically, I found myself sailing around Iceland on a luxury cruise, pretending I haven’t got a care in the world.

I’ve spent the last three weeks in Denmark, longer than I expected, but I haven’t regretted it a bit.

I spent a sleepy week in Oosterhout, a tiny municipality just north of Breda in the Netherlands.

I snuck into Ghent over the weekend.

The Netherlands has, basically, reopened. I don’t know if that’s smart, at the current stage of COVID, but it’s where they’re at.

I’m unintentionally but briefly passing through Ireland again, a victim of COVID bureaucracy.

The border between the UK and Ireland is obviously a strange one.

I am finally, tentatively, leaving Ireland.

I arrived in Ireland in June, 2020. I didn’t want to. I mean, I had to leave Korea after my visa ran out, and the United States was still recovering from a punishing first wave of COVID-19. I’d have stayed put if I could have, but I couldn’t.

I’d like you to imagine a drunken phone call, at 3am, from me to you.

So I’ve spent the last five weeks kind of bumming around Ireland, traveling-but-not-really to some of the places I missed the last time I went on walkabout.

I’ve spent the last two weeks crashing with friends again in Galway.

I’m still in Ireland, and the Coronavirus continues to make travel increasingly fraught.

It’s unreal, and not in a good way, being tucked into a safe corner of Ireland while the United States careens from bad to worse on almost every front.

In 2016, shortly after the New Year, a small group of armed militants took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in protest of the United States Government.

It took three months, but I finally figured out where I was supposed to be living in Seoul. And of course, I only found out in the last two weeks I was here.

My trip to Jeju has been a small reminder of the sort of thing I did on the regular just two months ago, fly someplace I’ve never been and spend a week checking the place out.

I’ve generally considered myself somewhat lucky, at least while traveling. I always seem to be catching trains at the last minute, or finding cheap places to stay, or getting flights canceled only to be rerouted on better schedules. I suspect it’s just a knack I have; I’ve always been something of a canny traveler, and I’ve built up an arsenal of tricks and hunches without really being aware of them.

As the western world descends into purgatory led (as is traditional) by Italy, I find myself bewilderedly wandering through a series of destinations which have every appearance of being, for a certain sort of traveler, a picture-postcard version of Paradiso. It’s difficult to express just how surreal the experience has been.

It’s been a surreal week in Singapore. It feels like Europe and the United States only just realized how serious COVID-19 is, with whole countries shutting down, quarantines, travel bans, the collapse of the stock market, and everybody just generally losing their shit.

Malaysia is one of those countries where I didn’t have a particularly strong sense of the place before I visited. What little I did have seems to have been stuck in the mid-1850s, a vague impression of beaches, piracy, and colonialism.

It’s been a sobering, reflective time in Cambodia.

My trip to Vietnam didn’t start all that auspiciously. My 8pm flight from Laos ended up being delayed for four hours. I spent most of the time in the dingy little airport terrified my flight was going to get canceled at some point after midnight.

I started my travel in Laos with a splurge; I booked a two day cruise down the Mekong on a longboat.

I’m just not getting Thailand. What I mean is, this is the first place I’ve visited where I felt like there were huge aspects of the culture which were hidden from me.

I’m currently typing this on a flight to Bangkok. I’m about an hour in — it’s about 10 hours, total — and it’s a rather uncomfortable mix of nerve-wracking and boring.

One of the things which people kept bringing up, when I mentioned places I wanted to see in the world, was the Icehotel in Sweden. It has this kind of weird totemic resonance.

I’ve been in England for a little over a week, for The Smoke and Midwinter, and it’s the last place I’ll be standing still for at least the next two months.

I think I’ve mentioned, I have three ways I choose places to visit.

The last couple weeks have been intentionally low key — in addition to the week of Christmas, I spent a week on the Queen Mary II, cruising over the classic route from Southampton to New York City.

In 1970, Roger Zelazny published a classic of fantasy literature, Nine Princes in Amber. In it, he imagines a world at the center of everything — Amber — from which all truth emanates.

The last few days have been spent in England, mostly in preparation for this transatlantic cruise I’ve booked. I’m ridiculously excited about it, simply because it’s the first real, genuine, bonafide vacation I’ve taken in years.

This past weekend was Immertreu, a German gangster larp set in the 1920s outside of Hamburg. I was playing it for a rather silly reason — I had signed up for Gangs of Birmingham, another 1920s gangster larp, and so I was going to buy a tweed suit and figured I might as well get some more use of it.

Estonia was supposed to be peaceful. I haven’t done anything. No grand plans, no schedules, no nothing. Just a week staying at a couple spas, relaxing. And for some reason, it just hasn’t worked out.

So I’m meeting a friend in Tallinn, in a few days, and having been in Birmingham I had about a week to kill between. And this is the way I think people imagine my travel is most of the time, I just started looking for places that had both cheap flights to Tallinn and cheap flights from Birmingham. And, hey, Brussels does, and I’d never been, and there’s a bunch of stuff I’d been wanting to see there, so I plugged in four days in Belgium.

I was in Birmingham for Camelot, a small larp convention. It was the first time it’s been run, and it was fine.

As I’ve mentioned, while it feels like I should be planning my travels by ear, booking transportation whenever the mood strikes me, the reality is that I’m scheduling everything months in advance.

I had plans for this jaunt through Canada. Visit friends, museums, maybe a boat tour or hanging out in a few parks. And I flew into Vancouver and made it into the city and just … didn’t. I haven’t done much of anything.

I’m at the tail end of a little over a week’s travel through the United States, heading over to Canada for a bit before finishing with a few days in New York and then heading back to Europe. I had some errands to run back here, and there was a larp announced in NYC, and then I decided to do another larp convention back in Europe and things got complicated.

I was back in Spain for the third time this year attending yet another larp, this one Conscience.

Just a quick couple days in Berlin, where I’m mostly picking up my costume for Conscience.

I’ve spent the last couple days staying with friends on the coast. Not doing much of anything except visiting.

I generally plan my trips anywhere from a few weeks to six months out. I suppose one of the promises of a nomadic lifestyle is the ability to travel anywhere on a whim, but the realities of visas and discounts from booking travel in advance make that something of a pipe dream.

Holidays are tricky. Whatever vague relationship I had with holidays in the United States has utterly disintegrated overseas. The Fourth of July is basically meaningless, Labor Day is on the wrong date. I’m left with Christmas and New Year’s.

I’ve been back in England for the week, this time primarily for Strange LRP — more on that in a bit — but given I was going to be here for the week I thought it might be nice to do some tourism, especially given my last three weeks of indolence.

Returning to a city you liked the first time around is a distinct pleasure, since you’ve started to find your way around.

I’ve spent the week in Norway, and not the sensible southern part of Norway. I’ve been way up north, like 12-hours-on-a-train north, and now I’m just spending the night in Oslo at the airport before flying out at 09:00.

I’ve spent the weekend in Spain playing yet another larp, this one Countdown.

I’m just bouncing through Berlin — landed at 10:00 yesterday, leaving at 07:20 today — to drop off some stuff and pick up some other stuff. And move a lot of stuff around.

I’ve never really enjoyed driving. It’s just not my thing; I’d rather sit in the passenger seat and fiddle with the radio.

I arrived in the UK late on Wednesday, flying into Heathrow. It’s my first time back since they instituted electronic border controls for Americans, so I could skip the always-too-long lines to talk to a border agent and just scan my passport instead.

I’ve been to Zagreb before, and it is always nice to return to someplace you’ve been before. Someplace you’ve liked, anyway.

I’ve been sick. Seriously sick, in the sense of “unable to scratch more than a couple of thoughts together in a row.”

The last few days have seen me wandering along the Montenegrin coast. I decided to take a few days out of the stay I had scheduled in Dubrovnik to slip over the border and check it out.

Okay, I sort of lied when I said I was heading to Croatia for a couple weeks of downtime.

I’m in the airport, heading to Croatia for a couple weeks of downtime. I just spent the weekend at Stone Soup, an “experience design camp.” Only it’s not really an experience design camp. It’s more of the idea of an experience design camp.

A tiny update as I bounce in and out of Düsseldorf. I’m on my way to Venlo, to Stone Soup, an “experience design camp.”

Sarajevo is tragic. I’ve visited battlefields before, like Gettysburg or Omaha Beach. But those were in the countryside, and besides, all happened before I was born.

Since I’m splitting my time between the Schengen and non-Schengen countries, I decided to spend most of the month in the Balkans, and scheduled that trip to start in Sarajevo. Getting there proved a little tricky, but I found a very cheap flight to Budapest and another very cheap flight to Sarajevo, with the only proviso that there are just a few flights every week to Sarajevo. So I spent a few days in Budapest.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m scheduling my travel around events I’m attending — typically larps — and this past week has been a good example.

When you’re born, you are given a dollhouse.

I just spent the last few days on a real, honest-to-goodness space ship with a bridge and an engine room and a hanger bay and a tendency to blow out the electricals every time we did a warp jump.

This is one of those in-between stops. I was only in Berlin for three days, mostly to take a short break, see friends, and drop some things in and out of storage.

I’ve never felt a particular affinity for the Mediterranean — too hot, not neurotic enough, I suppose — which is why I hadn’t visited Spain until a couple years ago, and my only previous visits to Italy were to Rome and Venice.

So I decided to see Scotland, for no very good reason except that I had three weeks to spend.

I’ve booked about a month of travel around the UK, with about ten days in England and the rest in Scotland.

I’m just recovering now from a larp over the weekend in the Netherlands, and I’m about to fly off to England to do another one.

If you don’t count the day trip I took a week ago, I’ve spent two whole weeks in Lviv, and it’s honestly been a relief.

Fair warning: I was in Warsaw to see Avengers: Endgame. I’ll be discussing my impressions near the end of this update, so if you’re one of the small sliver of people in the Venn diagram who 1) haven’t seen Avengers: Endgame, 2) care about Avengers: Endgame, and 3) hate spoilers, you’ll want to come back later.

The world is both impossibly large and astonishingly small.

The pattern I’m seeing, after eight months on the road, is a split between places I stay for less than a week and places I stay for more than a week. Less than a week and I barely have time to do the touristy stuff before I’m moving on. More than a week, and I’m living someplace, albeit briefly. I can relax, and catch my breath for a bit.

One of the problems with the way I’m living it that I often don’t have any idea where to go. I can go anywhere.

This marks the second time I’ve been in Madrid, and I’m starting to know the city. There’s different joys to visiting a place for the first time, compared to visiting the second or third time, compared to visiting dozens of times.

About a month ago, the biggest, splashiest larp company in the world died. Dziobak Larp Studios, responsible for College of Wizardry and the latest phase of “blockbuster” style games, announced they were significantly in debt and ceasing operations immediately.

It’s a very long flight day, leaving early today from Mexico and landing tomorrow morning in England. It marks the end of my trip through Mexico, and the last day I’ll be here until, honestly, I really don’t know.

Guadalajara seems to be the hipster, tech capital of Mexico, and I seem to have found digs in the middle of that, based on the number of bars and tattoo parlors and wood-fired pizza places in the area.

When I was looking at the map of Mexico, I really didn’t have any place in particular I wanted to see.

Okay, I know I said I was more-or-less done with resorts. Cancún is misleading here.

I really don’t like beaches. I can’t say I hate them, exactly, but as someone primarily from Northern European stock with skin that sunburns from merely thinking about noon in Rome, much of the charm of the beach is lost on me. Which raises the obvious question: what the hell am I doing in a Mexican resort town?

I just spent the night in Mexico City, before my flight to Puerto Vallarta. I’m currently munching on nachos in the airport lounge. I generally prefer to travel this way — arrive one day and depart the next, which makes things far less stressful, since I don’t need to worry about flights being delayed and missing my connection.

It’s butterfly season. A major reason I came to Zitácuaro is that, having booked flights into and out of Mexico, I discovered I was visiting right in the middle of the annual monarch migration, and having discovered that, I thought about what it would feel like if I knew that and didn’t visit.

Maybe I’m learning. I arrived here a couple days ago, and have crashed in a hotel room for the two nights I’ve been here.

I still miss New York.

I’ve just caught the train from Providence to New York City, having spent the weekend at Intercon, a larp convention in Rhode Island. I’ve got one more night left in the United States before I’m off, and New York seems like the place to spend it, given the choice.

It is a surprising relief to be in Toronto. It’s a nice city: affordable, charming, quirky. Big enough that there are things to do, but small enough that you don’t feel like you’re missing all that much if you don’t do them.

This, in a nutshell, summarizes the weirdness around my life these days. I spent 30 days where, barring a single day where I met a friend for dinner, I spent the time alone. This past week I’ve spent every day with friends, culminating in a weekend spent with 600 people, of which I knew about half.

When I was scheduling my flights to India, I discovered just about all of them went through Dubai. That made it relatively easy to book the weekend I was flying back so I arrived Friday and left Sunday.

I’m finally leaving India. I can’t say I’m terribly unhappy about that.

Bangalore is much, much more my speed. It’s renowned as the “Silicon Valley of India” and there’s a lot that’s similar: large Defense Department spending in the area encouraging tech startups, a highly educated workforce, inflated salaries compared to the rest of the country, a significantly multicultural outlook.

I arrived late in Delhi, and only spent the night, flying out the next day. Delhi is, not surprisingly, still loud, still crowded, and still polluted in the ways which bothered me when I was here a few days ago.

Here’s what I assumed would happen when I checked into my hotel in Agra: I’d drink water and snack on a pack of cashews while mending the first night.

Oh, man, is Delhi difficult to love.

One of the consequences of traveling cheaply, with basically complete freedom over when you need to arrive and depart, is that you end up scheduling weird flights.

Holidays are scary. That’s true for a lot of people — people with broken families, or painful upbringings, or bad memories. There’s a lot of emotional baggage tied up in Christmas for a lot of people, with all these images of happy families and cozy fires and professionally wrapped gifts.

How do you live a good life?

İstanbul is an object lesson in one of the risks of how I’m traveling.

For sanity’s sake, this has been an off-week. I’ve been holed up, staying with friends in Selçuk, and doing … well, not doing much of anything, really.

Goodbye, Berlin. I saw the friend I’ve been traveling with for two weeks off to the airport yesterday.

And we’ve just finished The Forbidden History. The costumes are repacked, the ridiculously late wrap party has wrapped, and we are speeding back to Berlin on the bus.

A small update for a small stopover. Any sane person probably would have just flown directly to Berlin and spent an extra day there. Instead, my friend and I flew to Hamburg for a single night.

It’s been a quiet number of days in Dublin. Kind of lazy, in conception if not practice.

Just a quick stopover in London, only two nights before continuing on to Dublin.

I just had a few days in Berlin, before flying off to meet a friend in London.

How do you replay a larp? I’m thinking about this because I’ve spent the last three days at College of Wizardry 19, where I’ve been teaching alchemy to a bunch of witches and wizards.

We’re right at the cusp of what I’m calling my “silly season,” a two-week whirlwind tour of a series of European cities bookended by larps on either end.

The last couple weeks have been spent in Kyiv, and I’ve kind of been treating it as the calm before the storm.

I barely landed in England. I had time to arrive at Heathrow, catch a bus to Gatwick, check into a B&B, grab dinner, sleep, then head for my flight out.

I am not in a good way.

I’m flying back to the United States. Just temporarily, and just for the weekend, but it’s still filling me with a surprising amount of dread. Or maybe not so surprising, given current events. I just don’t want to go.

Switzerland is what Americans imagine Germany is like. It’s very … buttoned-down, conservative, and precise.

Let’s discuss loneliness.

I suffer from depression. There are things that make it better (like hanging out with friends) and things that make it worse (like not hanging out with friends) and it’s been one of the things foremost on my mind when I was planning to ditch everything and hit the road.

I’m currently in the airport, waiting on my flight, finishing up the first part of my Croatian sojourn. How’s it going so far? Fine, I suppose.

Well, now I’m alone.

I’m on a bus back to Prague after playing the larp Avalon over the weekend. So I’m tired, apparently tick-free, sore, vaguely hungover, and flying off tomorrow.

Boy, I had forgotten how much I loved Prague. Not forgotten, maybe, but the last time I was here was at the start of a river cruise through the Rhine river valley, and even though I had a wonderful time and stayed for four days I guess I was just seeing so much and Prague was so early that it became one of those I really have to come back at some point places where you never quite remember why.

I’ve just boarded a bus at the main train station in Vienna on my way to Prague. I was only in town for the day; since I’m attending a larp at the end of the week I wanted to have time to hunt up costume pieces in Prague, plus it’s often easier to travel on weekends, plus I already spent a couple days in Vienna a few years ago. So I figured I’d be fine just quickly passing through.

Boy, do I regret that decision.

Burkina Faso is difficult. Difficult to wrap my head around, difficult to contextualize, difficult to write about. Most places I’m visiting or planning to visit — Croatia, or Poland, or Denmark, or Switzerland, for example — are all places I feel reasonably comfortable. Burkina Faso isn’t.

This is the big one. The biggest one to date, for me, anyway. I’m having kittens, so to speak.

Berlin is one of the early inflection points for my travels. Given that it’s centrally located (given the sorts of criss-crossing of Europe I’m anticipating) and has a lot of cheap travel options in and out, I’m considering using it as a hub city.

Let’s discuss baggage.

I think it’s important to try and balance things; if you’re stuck in a routine, it’s important to shake things up, do exciting and crazy things. Conversely, if you’ve (for the sake of argument) gotten rid of all your worldly possessions and struck out on an ill-considered journey, you should probably start small.

Full disclosure, I have no idea what I’m doing.