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.

In my previous post on French Long Stay visa (AKA OFII), I outlined the process I went through to apply for the French Long Stay visa. Once you get the stamp in your passport, there is still more to go. Frech Visa OFII stamp After landing in France, you have to let the state know you are there. You have three months to get the final OFII stamp for your long stay visa .

I have previously posted notes and information on backpacking and travel. This doesn’t fit with the theme of the previous post, so I am seperating them. I’ll probably do this going forward. A backpack on a chair in a random room. Backpacking in Western Europe is a little different from elsewhere. Specifically, how busy it seems all the time. The majority of the people I talk with in hostels are on vacation for a few weeks.