This final leg of my 2017 travel was focused on Spain and Italy. As I mentioned in my previous post, I left Ljubljana for Venice. It was mid-November at this point and I was exhausted. The pace had been very aggressive and didn’t leave much room for down time. I knew it would be tough, but I was surprised as to how much it had taken out of me mentally. This was even more apparent reviewing my photos.

After returning from Malaysia at the end of September, I embarked on a whirlwind of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Luxembourg, and Lichtenstein, after travelling through Paris, Bruges to Berlin with a friend. The leg of travel was mainly through Germany and looked like this: Berlin → Cologne → Bonn → Frankfurt → Luxembourg (Luxembourg) → Heidelberg → Baden-Baden → Stuttgart → Nuremberg → Munich → Neuschwanstein Castle → Lichtenstein → Salzburg → Vienna → Bratislava → Budapest → Ljubljana

I finally sat down and counted a few things related to my 2017 travel. Countries visited in Europe: 24 Cities/Towns visited Europe: 60 I’ve not included Malaysia and Morocco above. There is a map of all the places I’ve been in this post. I took many more car, bus & train rides on public transit or Uber/Grab but didn’t count them here. For the inter-city/inter-country modes of travel from 2017.

A few days ago, I saw a small job request for a script that would start OpenVPN on a GCP instance and connect to an external VPN service. The requester mentioned being able to SSH to the host and running a script on the host. The last part got me thinking about about how routing for OpenVPN might make less straightforward than it seems. It was. It seemed like a fun technical challenge so I took a crack at it.

In September 2017, I took a three week side trip from Europe to Malaysia. A friend suggested the trip and it seem like a good way to chase the fading European sunshine. I often joke that Malaysia was one of the best parts of my European travels. I flew from France to Kuala Lumpur by way of Oman. I had a few days to rest in KL and get used to the time change before my friend showed up from Penang.

This post is a little out of order, as I wrote about Normandy, France previously. I travelled in Normandy for a few weeks in July 2017 and then, again, at the end of August. In between my Normandy adventures, I was in The Czech Republic, Poland, Ireland, Poland again, and Ukraine. 1 Prague, Czech RepublicPrague was cool, but it really didn’t blow my hair back. I was surprised because I had been hearing how amazing this city was from fellow travellers.

It has been a few months since my last post. I figured I should post an update on what is happening with the blog and me. The blog isn’t dead and neither am I. Getting back to Europe from Malaysia in September, I was both buzzing while mentally fatigued. Malaysia was a truly amazing trip but the previous 6 months of travel had taken a bit of a toll. I spent October traveling through Germany and November/December in Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Portugal.