On the Road with Julie

Greetings friends! It’s been a few years since my last “On the Road” journey. And the next one has already begun! 

With 2 carry on bags and as much clothing as I can fit on my body, on January 2nd, I hopped on a flight out of Rochester, NY across the pond for a 6 month trip around the world to pursue my passion for language learning outside of the comforts of my own home and into the lands where those languages live. Along the path of this grand adventure, I’ll find myself in France, Spain, Morocco, Germany, Austria, Italy, Latvia, Georgia, India, China and Japan!

A smorgasbord of spreadsheets and a load of logistics later, I am already one month into this marvelous adventure before getting around to saying hello here on the blog. Some of you know that this trip is the last on a list of massive bucket list trips that I have spent years (and years) trying to pull together and turn into a reality. While I have managed to pull off each trip in all the ways I’ve hoped, I’ve never quite nailed getting my blog organized before leaving. This trip is no different. I did manage to finally clean up the layout a little bit and make it a bit more organized – I’ll count that as a win. For those of you that tuned in for the journey my husband, Ryan, and I took across all 50 states last year, where we didn’t get to putting the blog up until 2 months and 12 states in, well, being only 1 month and 1 country into this journey, I’m ahead of the game! Progress, not perfection 😄

I hope to fill the blog on this trip with a mixture of long form musings and stories with quick updates and photos. 

If you are subscribed, a heads up that you will probably get 4 or 5 emails in the next few days while I bring the blog up to date. After that, the frequency will be more like every week, every other week or even a month between posts. It all depends on when the spirit strikes while I’m busy enjoying this adventure! 

Many of you already know this, but for the purpose of really diving into a true language immersion, I’m doing my best to stay in my target language while in each country. If you text me or email me Monday through Saturday and are willing to play, reach out to me, using google translate, and send me your message in the language I’m in at the moment and I’ll respond to you in that language and, then you can use google translate to understand what I sent. On Sundays, I’ll be more linguistically liberal and that’s when you’ll get messages in English. 

On that linguistic note, I’m going to try to write some of my blog posts in my target language too, if I can find the time and if I am confident that what I’m writing is not absolutely ridiculous and insulting. I’ve learned as a language learner, it is so easy to think you’ve just written something brilliant, when, in fact, you just made some horrific or insane statement because you chose the wrong vowel, or translated something directly from English that doesn’t fly. So, I’m going to try to get native-speaker seals of approval before I post in another language, lest I accidentally debase myself while overestimating my linguistic capacities.

The next post you get will be a little essay I wrote the day I left for the trip on January 2nd, as I found myself swelling with all of the feelings of excitement and passion for language learning that brought this trip into being. After that, you’ll get 3 or 4 posts detailing my first month in France. I just arrived in Spain yesterday and, once I get you updated on France, you’ll start to get news from España. From there on out, hopefully, my posts will get to you right along side my movements across the world. 

When I set out with my list of bucket-list trips and experiences about a decade ago, there was no doubt in my mind that I would eventually do them. But, still, each time I find myself actually in the experience, it is a “pinch-me” moment of awe and disbelief that I am really doing it. Sitting here in the Madrid airport with four weeks of France and French behind me and 5 months of a melange of language and adventure in front of me, that sensation is in full force. This particular trip is a product of decades of passion for language learning, aspirations of seeing the world and dreams of learning languages in the lands where they live – and, I’m amazed, excited and so grateful to actually be here, living that dream! 

I’m looking forward to traveling the road with you!