Hello from Seattle! There’s innovation in the air as hundreds of young technologists gather from around the world for the world finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition. I’ll be posting more about that in the next few days, but for now you can follow the action on my Twitter account, @theTrendyTechie. In the meantime, this post is the photo diary from our epic Six Countries in 24 Hours adventure! If you haven’t yet heard the story of how my Italian citizenship saved me, you can watch the video here.

It all began in Halifax, a normal vacation beginning with a cab ride and a boarding pass. Little did we know we’d be seeing more transit stations in the next 24 hours than we’ve seen in the last year, and hopping on trains to span hundreds of kilometres and six countries.

The flight to Toronto was beautiful, and the next day (after the passport fiasco) we headed back to Toronto Pearson to await our flight to England. We got there seven and a half hours early to be sure we could sit together, and the lovely check in attendant gave us discounts to the Premium Lounge! We stayed there for five hours and enjoyed the unlimited snacks, high-speed internet, and free-flowing drinks until it was time to board.

The flight was very peaceful, though we did not get as much sleep as we needed to conquer the amount of traveling we’d be doing when we stepped onto English soil.

When we arrived we took a five minute stop at Marks & Spencer, the most amazing supermarket in the world. Their freshly prepared foods make amazing healthy on-the-go snacks, which was perfect for our full day of traveling! We didn’t know it at the time, but we would have zero time to stop for a snack in Paris - in fact we barely caught any of our trains! In England a wonderful Eurorail attendant named Sue ushered us through the business lane so we’d get through security on time, and thanks to her we caught the train to Paris with two minutes to spare. When we arrived in Paris it took us forever to figure out the botched ticket purchasing station, and it was only because of the generous information desk worker who gave us his subway tickets that we made it to Gare de l’Est and bought our tickets to Munich, again making it on the train by five minutes.

Soon after I took that picture of the rail ticket, our phones and camera batteries died. It didn’t matter much though, because we were so wiped out that we fell straight asleep. Take it from me: if you’re getting sleepy while reading, just put your book down. Otherwise it will fall on your face and wake you up in front of a train car full of strangers. Whoops.

These last pictures are the first ones we took in Italy, the day after we arrived. Shortly after we woke up (we slept fifteen hours and woke up at 5pm!) we went to the Flamingo Pizzeria in Cles, and finished off the night with a signature Tiramisu.