Playing Catch Up

I am not very good at this blogging thing.  Not at all.  Almost 11 months since the last post.  Let's play some catch up.

I left off where? Just arriving in Barcelona...

Dammit.

Alright, to quickly summarize what happened in Barcelona:

I arrived in Barcelona, and within three hours had a job as a tour guide.  A massive case of right place, right time.  Within a week I was told I would be a manager of the Barcelona section of the company (at the time called Tours Non Stop).  The company also ran tours in Madrid and Valencia.

When I started the company gave tours for people staying at hostels (7 hostels throughout the city of Barcelona).  These tours consisted of two 2.5-3 hour walking tours of Barcelona (History tour and an Architecture Tour), a Tapas & Flamenco show tour on certain nights and, of course, our lynch pin, our Pub Crawls (Or "Party Tours" as Pub Crawls are  illegal in Barcelona).

By the time I left Barcelona 9 months later, our company had changed names (Tour Me Out), and we had added a few other activities.  We added a Beach Party, Wii Night, Trivia Night and partnered with another company to offer Street Art Tours.  We had expanded quite a bit.

So basically we would lead people around, talk about the amazing city that Barcelona is for a few hours.  Then take customers to the beach/play wii/MC trivia and hang out with them.  On certain nights we would take them out to a Tapas dinner (tour guides got free dinner), then a flamenco show (tour guides got in free).  And every night we would take them out and party in Barcelona on our Pub Crawl (tour guides drank... yep... free).  Three bars and one club.  Every night.

We got paid to do all of this.  Paid to give information, lay on the beach, play video games, eat and drink with travelers.

There was also the other stuff, the business stuff (accounting, marketing, hiring, training, etc.) but that is rather dull, so we won't get into that.  Just know it wasn't ALL fun and games (just mostly).

...And I left this?

Oh well.

Barcelona, for me, was interesting.  I met some absolutely amazing people, lived in some crazy places, culminating in living with 3 other tour guides in an apartment where one can only understatedly describe the living conditions as debaucherous.

I do miss Barcelona and all the people in it.  All the people I worked with: The receptionists at the hostels (Be Mar, Be Sound, Be Ramblas, Equity Gothic/Seapoint/Centric and Center Ramblas), the bartenders at our bars (Cosmo's, Ryan's, Can Eusabio, The Queen Vic, The Quiet Man), the bouncers at the clubs (Apolo, BLVD, Jamboree) and most of  all, all the staff of Tours Non Stop/Tour Me Out:

Cian, Conan, Kieran, Julia, Sue, Natty, Calum, Dave, Scott, Ruby, Matheus, Adam, and our glorious CEO Adrian.

Some of the craziest nights we shall never remember.  Love you all.


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I left for home on May 19th after exactly one year in Europe.  I left to prepare for a new adventure.  And up until a few days ago I didn't know what this new adventure would be.  

Until I lived up to this blogs name and bought a one way ticket to Central America.  I am leaving in three months.  October 24th is the date.

So here is what I am going to try and do with this blog (we shall see).  I am going to try and blog my preparations for a trip for the next three months.

The goal of this is to show people how easy it is to actually travel.

I have noticed that people make traveling out to be more difficult, complicated and more expensive than it needs to be.  So I am going to show how it can be done.