A more purposeful blog!

I know... I know:  ANOTHER blog.  Though I assure you with some reasonable confidence that this blog will actually convey useful and perhaps entertaining information about my current location, adventures, and life happenings to my friends and family.  Instead of writing about my aversion to stable employment and dreams of adventure, I will now go ahead and be averse to employment and start having those adventures.

February 9th, 2011 marks the beginning of a 6 week foray into southern Europe.  Behind my desk currently lies roughly 70 Liters of camping, climbing, and "living" equipment, items in this pile have undergone careful selection in order to adhere to the 23kg limit.  The first flight leaves from Denver, quickly lays-over in London, and delivers us in Madrid, Spain.  My good friend and fellow climber, Amanda, will be joining me for the task.  Our basic plan is to move in a general, clockwise horseshoe around Spain, moving West from Madrid towards Toledo, then to Portugal to do some climbing, next through Andalucia to do lots more climbing, then up the Eastern coast towards Catalonia, where we will climb more, and then to Barcelona to drink heavily for a few days before our next flight.  A potential stop in Morocco is also possible.  The next update will be from Spain.

Below you will notice I have provided a handy map of our Spanish roadtrip.  Excuse the quick sojourn into the ocean.  As we progress I will update our location on the map (courtesy of google.maps).  The blue arrows and text balloons indicate a climbing destination.  The page numbers are more for my reference, but if you happen to have the Southern Europe climbing atlas, you will be able to see more information on where we are climbing.

On the 1st of March we will be flying to Rome, Italy.  You can see our Italian itinerary below.  As we venture North, we will probably make the judgement call to drive up into Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and/or Slovenia, depending on our level of energy.  Knowing myself, I will probably elect to see all four options given our three week time budget.  Even though the red travel-line does not travel through Arco and the Dolomite region, we will most definitely be traveling to/staying in this area (too much work to redraw a terrible-looking map).  I've only provided text bubbles for the climbing destinations we will be staying at for multiple days.

If anyone has any input regarding where we should go skiing/climbing in this region, it would be appreciated.

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-Alex