Its all a lie!!

We need to come clean; Erin and I have not been traveling Europe for the last 6 months. We have actually been held up in Wimberly Texas. We truly wanted to get away from it all and experience something different so we googled "small town in texas" and found this lovely town called Wimberly Texas (http://www.visitwimberley.com/). We really did not want to tell you guys, because we admit that it does sound kind of odd so we invested in a bunch of back drops so that we could take pictures in front of them and claim to be at these amazing places all across Europe.

A good example is this back drop that we shot this weekend. It really looks like we are standing infront of the Acropolis, but in reality we just got back from a lovely picnic with our neighbors Ned and Elda. Ned runs the local gas station here in Wimberly and Elda is a retired school teacher that just loves to knit.

You may be wondering what we have been doing to pass our time while in Wimberly. Well I have been spending lots of time on the net researching these places so that I can write convincing trip reports (all this research has shown me that it would be really nice to be able to visit these places, but considering that the Dollar is getting killed by the Eruo it just does not seam prudent). I even wrote one for our imaginary Greece trip, and in the interest of not wasting my hard work I will still publish it.

Hello from SUNNY Greece; I pitched this trip to Erin on Christmas day after I found 2 round trip tickets to Greece for about 150 Euros. It was really easy to ask the question of "when are we ever going to get to Greece for around 150 bucks" it makes it easy to say "yes". We booked the tickets and a couple of weeks later we where staring at the clear blue Ageian sea. Not to brag but I have gotten pretty good at finding really good cheap places to stay. This room in Athens was a great example, it was blocks from the Acropolis, in a part of town that did not allow cars, and was 135 Euros for 3 nights. Its true that you could feel every spring in the bed, but hey we where blocks from the Acropolis.

So our goals for the trip where simple, we wanted sun, I wanted to climb, and see all the acient history that Athens had to offer. I would say that it was a success!

Friday:

Erin ducked out of school a little early and I got done being "Manney" (read the last blog post) and we are off to Athens.

Saturday:
Woke up and realized that the acropolis was literally in our back yard. Or first goal was to go get some sun by the sea. We took the a tram ride for about an hour threw the city and ended up at the Agean. Honestly the beach was dirty and had one to many fat men in Speedos, but and this is an important but, the Sun was warm. We sat there soaked up the sun and read our books.

Sunday:

I really wanted to prove to myself that I could do something adventurous in Europe and not end up in the hospital. It's for that reason that we spent most of the day sunday completely lost, riding wrong buss after wrong buss, in search of this climbing area on the outskirts of town. Now for those of you that have never been to Athens you should know that the city sprawls and I mean SPPPRRAAWWLLLSS. Its no wonder that it took us 5 hours of dusty buss riding to get to this crag. Erin said that she really enjoyed this part of traveling, and I can honestly say after 6 months of less then average adventure, that this was the first time I wanted to jump into my pick up truck and just drive to the crag instead of ride this bus all over Athens. Eventually around 1ish we made it, climbed a couple of routes, and headed home glad that we made the effort to try and find this place.

Monday:
Checked out a bunch of old stuff. I have read several rather large books lately on WW2/Germany history. I could even go as far to say that I have a fairly good working knowledge of the country I live in. Going to Greece taught me that I have so much more to learn about so many cultures out there. They where building impressive monuments to the gods 3,000 years before Hitler got out of Diapers. It definitely motivated me to learn more about Athenian history.

Well thats about all I have to report, go check out Athens if you can look past the smog, sprawl, and noise, it has something valuable to offer at every turn.

So there you have it, my most recent well researched fake blog about how cool Europe is. All the while we have been hanging out in Wimberley Texas with Ned and Elda just sitting on the poarch gosipping, sipping tea, and knitting warm ski hats so that next winter when I am skiing the steep and deep again with my buddies my head dosent get cold!

Don't forget to check out the next two Blog post. I have not emailed you all since I last posted.

Note: Any spelling errors in these pages were indroduced intentionally to demonstrate new and improved ways of spelling old, worn-out words.