On our journey, we were blessed with weirdly nice weather and oddly good timing nearly everywhere we went.  It’s not that we didn’t have our rainy days (in Venice), our blistering cold days (in Budapest), and our staggeringly hot days (in Bangkok) — but for the most part, we managed to bob and weave with the calendar in very fortuitous ways.  We spent the better part of Europe’s longest winter in decades down in Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and Israel — still managing to ski in freshly fallen snow in the French Alps.  We ended up finding ourselves in Barcelona on the night of the Parade of the Three Kings.  In Prague, we happened to stumble upon the inauguration of the new president and found ourselves with a front row seat.  In Belfast, we coincidentally arrived on the 11th night of July, which is one of the most notorious (and fascinating) nights of the year in Northern Ireland.  And as fate would also have it, we managed to be at our most northerly point, high in the Baltic Sea on June 21st, the longest day of the year.  We’d heard about the Midnight Sun for our whole lives and, thanks to the alchemy of the trip, we actually got a chance to experience it.