Introduction

Last night, I suddenly remembered that Europe has much less surface area than America.

Last night, I spent several hours looking at maps and realizing how little time was required to hit the vast majority of the continent.

This morning, I found out that Renault allows one to visit a few dozen countries as part of their Eurodrive program.

This afternoon, I made a handy chart which proved that in the 21 days provided by Renault, I can manage to go to Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, San Marino, Turkey, the Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Vatican City. For those counting (and I am), that's 42 countries and principalities, or 18.6% of the countries of the world.

Listening to me during this entire period of realization was my boyfriend who has a Wanderlust that it trying its best to catch up to mine. He's never been off of our continent before, so an experience like this, something completely different, would be awesome for his first foray into the world of Europe. I've been to ten of the above countries (and lived in one of them) and am no stranger to travel, so I have more than a modicum of knowledge in this area of European travel.

So we're in this together. I'm the planner and will therefore be using this to keep track of my preparations: passport updates, visas (only two!), car leasing, accommodations, maps, et cetera.

And thus the nurse and computer scientist begin their plans to take over Europe. It should be pretty damn awesome.