YOU actually have to do all the planning.

You can’t fall back on your travel buddy who’s far better than you are at deciphering train and bus timetables, even when you speak the language they’re printed in and he doesn’t.

You can’t divvy up researching the “cultural stuff vs. historical stuff” according to who’s more interested in what, to make it easier to determine what’s actually worth seeing given your time constraints.

You have to read both the “Hey stoners, want to see some cool shit?” and “Hey American middle-aged dentist traveling abroad, want to see some culture?” travel guides you’ve purchased instead of having one person read one and one person read the other, and being able to quickly figure out which sites are recommended by both.

You can’t fob stuff off on your travel buddy when you have a busy week and allow him to fob stuff off on you when he does in turn.

And you have only yourself to blame when you’re up until almost 3am a month before you leave, and you still have only a vague idea where you’re staying or what you’re seeing.

I’m sure the freedom to do whatever I feel like will come in handy when I’m actually bouncing around Spain, but I seriously underestimated how much more of a pain in the ass the planning process becomes when you’re doing it all yourself.

I’ve finally uploaded the last of the best of my Europe photos, from my 2005 trip with Mark.

Here’s a link to the full set, the captions have descriptions of what the hell it is that you’re looking at, along with some entertaining stories of stuff we did while over in Euroland.

If, unlike me, you don’t have an abundance of free time on your hands, they’re also broken down country by country if you don’t want to look at all 400 or so of them.

As long as it took me to upload all my photos, I’d hate to see how long it takes Mark to upload his. He took about three times as many pictures as I did, though in all fairness, he’s a much better photographer.

And since I’m talking about Mark as a photographer, I think this is obligatory: