The Long Trek Home...

When you are young and backpacking your way across the world "logistics" becomes an art. You figure out how to get from point-a to point-b and everywhere in-between. However, when coming home from our Middle East/Northern Africa trek Lindsay and I forgot that art. Our schedule to get from Morocco to home (Salt Lake City) turned out to be a logistical nightmare that left us so tired and worn out that we were on the verge of insanity! The objective was this: get from the desert Moroccan city of Marrakech to our studio apartment in SLC as cheap and quick as possible. This involved trains, sleeping in airports and the worst flight pattern ever. Here is how the journey ended up:

Marrakech->Tangier->Madrid->Frankfurt->New York->Los Angeles->Salt Lake City

This trip started after a long and hot day exploring Marrakesh. We boarded a very hot and crowded night train headed north. The next morning we woke up in the fantastic whitewashed city of Tangier (made famous by the Bourne Ultimatum movie). We spent most of the day exploring the city and in the afternoon we took a short flight to Madrid. Once in Madrid we took the Metro to the center of the city and just spent the rest of the night taking in the sights and sounds of that beautiful European metropolis. At around midnight we took the metro back to the airport and slept that night on the cold, dirty and very hard airport floor. The next morning we boarded flight 1 to Frankfurt, then flight 2 to New York, then flight 3 to Los Angeles and finally flight 4 to Salt Lake City. 2 Days, 9 time zones and 3 nights without a bed later we found ourselves home. (in case you are wondering, we booked the flights with skymiles which meant we had to take whatever they gave us). Although we loved the adventure this last leg of our trip left us so exhausted we could barely stand, oh, did I mention that we did this entire trip home carrying our backpacks?...ouch!