In the beginning...

"Traveling will leave you speechless and then turn you into a storyteller." After a very short 25 days filled with a lifetime supply of experiences, coffee, and gelato, these words could not be truer. For those of you who may have missed my constant (if not obsessive) updates on Facebook, I have been backpacking through western Europe with my girlfriend for the past month. This was a dream come true because backpacking Europe is something you always hear about, but I didn't imagine I would ever join the "elite adventurers." And to think all of this was dreamed up because I will be spending the next 4 months studying at the University of Granada in Spain!

In the off chance that you do not know me, let me introduce myself. My name is Max McGehee, and I am a junior at Western Kentucky University. I am majoring in Spanish and Public Relations while participating in the intensive Chinese Language Flagship Program (I recognize I am in over my head, but I'm stubborn.). But I am so much more than my education. I am an adventure seeking, culture loving, coffeeholic with a very supportive family, without whom my travels would not be possible. I have 3 younger sisters-Margo, Jocelyn, and Piper, whom I can honestly say are 3 of my best friends-and 2 amazing parents-Kerry and Michelle.

I won't bog these posts down with an incredible amount of detail, but I do appreciate those of you who have made it to this sentence. McKinley and I (eventually) flew out of Cincinnati on December 28th, but not before God sent us a temporary travel mom to coach us along. Our flights were delayed from the minute we said goodbye to our families and were officially "on our own." Because of this delay we were going to miss our connecting flight from JFK to Madrid and, consequently, our flight to Granada. Tracy-our God send-was traveling the same airlines as us all the way to Madrid. So we teamed up and got to work. Arranging new flights was chaotic, stressful, and exhausting. But Tracy made sure us kids arrived safely. The running and calling and changing and begging sure didn't feel like the glamour behind those 200 Instagram likes. But, nonetheless, we made it to Granada, bused our way to Malaga, and caught our flight to Paris, France!

I didn't understand the behind the scenes work that goes into traveling until we were in the Paris Metro, lugging our backpacks, with absolutely no idea how to get ourselves to the apartment.  We asked many people for help without any luck, but God continued to provide a way for us. We asked these two girls if they spoke English (they did not); but they did speak Spanish! I have never been so happy to hear Spanish than when those girls kindly helped us along the way. And let me tell you, there is no feeling quite like having the Eiffel Tower revealed to you after a lot of struggling. You'd think its impression on me would fade after seeing it everyday...

...It didn't.

We visited (brace yourself for a run on sentence and horrible puns) the Louvre Museum and smiled at the Mona Lisa, the Rodin Museum and pondered over The Thinker, triumphed the traffic circling the Arc de Triomphe, (I don't have a pun for this one) Notre Dame Cathedral, and toured laTour Eiffel-all 700+ steps to the viewing platform of the second tier! And to wrap it all up, we counted down the seconds to 2016 at the Eiffel Tower. 

This has been the first stop in a nutshell (kinda). If you made it this far, reward yourself with a cup of coffee. I know I would. And look for my next blog post after I get a solid 12 hours of sleep.