France, and swimming in my underpants...

What it do?! What it don't?!

Just a quick update from the Andrew and James Europe Tour! Things have been really going our way so far....NOT! Borat? Anyone? We have definitely been making the best of what we've been dealt. We're having a blast! Meeting some crazy people that have just made us think what a small world we live in.

All along our backpacking trip, we've hit some bumps, but that's to be expected and they brought alot of humor to our trip, which we proably don't need anymore...that would be dangerous. Paris was amazing, highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make a romatnice getaway and see some incredible sights! Of course, my date was and is Andrew, and it's actually been pretty romantic :) What's the first thing you think of when you think about Paris? "I don't know Lloyd, the French are assholes..." No, they're cool, but the Eiffel Tower, especially with my date, Andy Pants, was our first priority of seeing. Where the train station is in comparison to the Eiffel Tower is incredibley inconvenient but it worked out because we got to see a bunch of other amazing sights on the way; The Louvre, Notre Dame, The Arc de Triumph...I'm really getting side tracked, Andrew and I enjoyed a bottle of champagne, a bottle of wine and two beers all for 25 euro with the illuminated Eiffel Tower towering over us....SPECIAL.

But on to more important things, my underpants....our overnight train from Paris to Venice that we were supposed to be on got over-booked by the railways and so we had to find an alternate round down to Italy. Arnaud!!!! Here we come!!!! If any of you reading this were around my junior year at Willamette, you should have remembered a certsain French-exchange player named Arnuad Vidaller; a.k.a the man! Our atlernate route took us down to Montpellier to Monte Carlo to Nice. Well, Arnuad was not home in Montpellier, but his best friend Dario was, and another awesome dude to put into the good dudes collection for Andrew and James...he showed us around, and was extremely helpful. After a great night in Montpellier we made it to Nice to find that all the hostel's and most of the hotels were full and/or out of our price range....what to do what to do.....oh, let's go swimming at 1:30am in the northern part of the Medditeranean and then sleep on the beach! yay! We stripped down into the only bathing suit we had (Champion boxer briefs) and jumped in. It was incredible, the water was warm, clear and blue. After swimming we sent up our spot on the oh so comfortable rock beach :( and tried to fall asleep. There were bogies all over the place! "Bogies" as we call them, are potential threats of stealings or muggings that could be hamrful to our two-man regiment. Once we secured the area, we started to fall asleep, I woke up about an hour later to my entire body shivering from the cold wind of the coast. I looked over at Andrew and he was doing the same thing...PLAN B; find some cardboard for a bed and find a park....we did, and I will never be more grateful for any bed than the one I slept on the next night. Our neighbors in the park were not helpful either, always asking us for money, food, and drugs....Bro! we don't have nay of those! That's why we're hear sleeping next to you! "Our neighbors aren't very friendly dude," I said as I nudged Andrew "Ya, that's because our "neighbors" James, are bums!". It was quite the experience....

The next day, we got up around 7am, got some breakfast, got back into our underwear and wnet to the beach fro about 4 hours until our next train from Nice to Milan, Italy. I will remember this trip for the rest of my life, and I will never need a sleeping pill or warm milk to put me to sleep for the rest of my life, thinking about the night sleeping on the rockiest beach in the world, and then finishing the night in a park on cardboard will do just the trick....

PEACE!