Europe Interrail 2004

24/06/04 "Heather's Brainwave of the Day" Brian: Apparently Heather will be having one "brainwave" per day. I'm unconvinced. On a less serious note, we have now been fornicating for 5 months. The next uni 'anniversary' will, hypothetically, be 9 months. For a 'less serious section' I feel that that was rather deep. We booked our Samos youth hostel today. This took much longer than we thought but we have a bed for the night. The food sounds good. As far as I understand, it could be that we'll come home after Istanbul because it's too scary to think about the whole 3 months - a day at a time is the only way it will work. Incidentally, I still can't believe I'm doing this or the I'm doing this with - I've never felt so lucky as I do now doing this with.

 20/06/04 Day -24 Brian: I hereby christen this diary: Diary. May its cover be hard and clean and its pages neat and tidy. And may it be filled with more than just Heather's ramblings. I'm not supposed to make a big deal out of the fact that this time, 2 weeks today, we'll be on our way to Athens. But I think that this is the perfect time for reflecting... It feels like we had too much time to plan this yet we're still rushing. We'll be ready in time, we'll have to be. Not sure about the mental side of things though... it's too scary to try and imagine what it'll be like.Day -20

I created this blog on the 3rd January 2026. It is 74k words, across three physical notebooks, written interchangeably by me and Heather. To transcribe it, I took photos of each page and got Claude Code to process each image using its built-in OCR and convert to text.  I would expect there to be 1-5 significant word errors on every page (multiple pages per entry). How many will depend on our handwriting on the day. Tables / images / footnotes etc will all be processed badly.  That said, for every image I checked, the start and end were right, and the overall meaning was there.  I asked Claude to differentiate our handwriting and prefix sections with "Brian: " and "Heather: ", but it seems to have done this only a tiny handful of times.  So, for the original text and/or to identify who the first person is in any given section, check the original images. At the time of writing, these are in an album in my Apple Photos collection, in 2004, side by side with the actual ...