A year ago today...

A year ago today, Mark and I were packing our backpacks for Europe. We were heading over to Portugal to see my parents and decided to tack on some other traveling. We visited Paris, Venice, Rome, Florence, Lisbon, and Madeira.

Since we didn't have this blog back in those days, I'll post our adventures now, a year later. I'll add some pictures of things that we saw or did that day and give some highlights. We kept a travel journal, which I thought I would never look at again, but I've actually cracked it open a few times. And I will again, to help with the posts.

So, a year ago today, we were packing our backpacks. I'm sure we also did laundry and did a last minute run to Wal-Mart because that seems to be the pre-travel routine for us...=o)

This was our luggage for the trip.

18 days of travel with one backpack (good thing Mom and Dad let us do laundry for free!). Mine was this blue one and Mark had a black and grey one. Yeah, we looked like tourists, but we loved not having to roll a suitcase over the cobblestones and up stairs. And having carry-ons only for the trip took off some of the stress of not getting our luggage in time in one of the countries.