Our European Vacation

Alright, it's officially been over a month since we've been home from Europe. Luckily, we decided to keep up with some notes each day. Matt actually took over the writing of the notes after day 1, since he seemed to have more time while I was planning or calling the kids. I'm going to make an attempt to actually get those edited, posted, and add pictures. I'll likely do it a day or 2 at a time. Maybe each city separate. So I guess this would be a "stay tuned" because I am officially working on it. :)

While you're waiting, though, here's a bit of pre-trip for you. No pictures to add, just words.

I suppose all good trips start with the pre-trip planning. Trust me; there was a LOT of pre-trip planning involved in this vacation. While I had intentions of documenting everything from the beginning, that didn’t end up happening. I would bore my friends and family with every detail, however for some reason I didn’t think to start typing a “trip report” of sorts. Better late than never, though, right? (This is the procrastinator’s law. Being president of Procrastinator’s Anonymous, I’m very familiar with it.)

Hitting the high points of the planning, I’ll start at the beginning. It was actually over a year ago that a friend of mine said she was going on a Disney cruise for her 5th anniversary this March. The thought of going on a cruise to celebrate our 10th anniversary was too tempting to resist. I asked if she minded if we crashed the cruise. She thought it was a great idea. So a 4 day Disney cruise it was. I booked it and put the $400 deposit down last spring. After I had Cadence in June, I was talking to her about the cruise and she said that she hadn’t wanted to tell me, what with me being a fragile and irrational pregnant woman, but they were cancelling the cruise due to budget constraints. I was bummed, but okay with that. Matt and I started to choose other dates to travel. We had been going on the cruise that departed the day before their actual anniversary, but it was a more expensive week. We started looking at dates. But being a procrastinator, I didn’t act on anything. In August, my “sister” Mariana came for our 10th class reunion. Mariana was our foreign exchange student from Brazil our senior year of high school. We got to know each other and became very good friends, so when she needed a home for the third part of the year, I begged my parents to volunteer and they said yes. Ta da! Instant sister/very best friend. We haven’t seen much over the years, but she is still one of the people I love most in this world. She is now living in Birmingham, UK with her husband Alessandro. Unfortunately, Ale got stuck in Brazil in August when he was supposed to be coming to the US with her. I was pretty upset that we didn’t get to meet him. One night Mariana and I were talking and she said I should come to Europe instead of going on the cruise. The idea was planted and it was just up to convincing Matt. His only stipulations were that he wouldn’t have to drive and that he could see castles. Easy enough.

Then the planning started. 6 months of planning. It felt a lot like “hurry up and wait”. I was trying to figure out all the details, we had to get the dates down, and then had to make sure we could afford it. I wanted to try to hit as many places as we could. I was aware that we weren’t going to see all of the sights in every place, and that was fine with me. We really wanted to hit the biggies. We wanted to hit London, Paris, Rome, and then Barcelona since I’d been to Spain but not that far north. I did tons of research. I kept my eyes on plane fare. With Mariana’s help, I looked into packages to take Eurostar to Paris. Luckily, the plane tickets we booked with British Airways included a FREE 2 night hotel stay. I was thrilled about that and chose a nice hotel in Rome for our free stay. I’m glad I did, or we might not have gone to Rome. Really, I didn’t expect to fall in love with it and as the money started to run out, I would have called that off. I could go into all the details of planning the trip, but I won’t bore everyone. I will just say that eventually everything did get booked, we had passports, and we had secured my mom to watch the kids for the 2 weeks. We had a couple thousand dollars invested into tickets, our plane tickets and hotel rooms were booked, and we were going to Europe!

Loyal dog, crazy owner

When we got our dog Casey about 6 1/2 years ago, we saw potential. His tiny puppy face was so adorable. He was sleepy and so sweet when we went to the farm to pick him out. His father is a pure bread Siberian Husky and his mom is a black lab mix that wandered into the yard and hooked up with the crazy Husky. The puppies that resulted were interesting. There was one white one that looked just like his daddy, a chubby black boy, 2 mixed color girls, and Casey. He looks the most like his sisters. I guess I would have preferred a girl, but they were both spoken for. The owners were planning to keep the white one, as they were getting rid of the dad and keeping the mom. That left us with the roly black one and the little guy that was sleeping in the box. We woke up the little guy and he was the only one that didn't chew on Matt's shoe. lol They were only 6 1/2 weeks old, but the owners assured us that they were weaned and fine to go on their merry ways. We chose the sleepy guy and paid a $75 adoption fee. As we let him say goodbye to his family, his mom jumped up, put her paws on Matt's shoulders, and gave him a lick on the cheek. She then gave an affectionate nudge to her first son to leave the nest, and walked back to her other babies. That should have been our first indication. We soon discovered that he was sleeping because he had been terrorizing the whole place the entire day.

Wasn't he just too adorable? Who could say no to that face? Oh, yeah. The people whose shoes, rocking chair, and camcorder cable he decided to chew on. We said no a lot that first year. He was great at staying in the yard for awhile. Then he started wandering a bit. We had to tie him up. Unfortunately, he is a husky. He likes to run. He did that a LOT until rather recently. When we moved to Chilton when he was a bit over a year old, I vividly remember watching a lady walking down the road with a pretty dog following right behind her as if on a leash. Except that he wasn't on a leash. And it was our dog! We met a lot of neighbors with "I'm sorry, he likes to run. He's friendly, just kind of dumb. Could you, um, grab his collar please? Thanks!" He was great with the cat, since we had her a couple years before we got him. He was kind of raised by her. They're practically the same color and get along rather well. This is them back about 5 years when we lived in Chilton (I had somehow not had the date on my camera set right, so ignore that date in the corner. It was 2004.)

In those eyes we always saw the love and loyalty. He has food allergies and itches and/or gets the runs if he eats the wrong things. He doesn't do fetch. He does do tug. He loves to play tug. With ropes, socks, tennis balls...yeah, he's odd. He likes to be vacuumed, which happens quite frequently during the shedding seasons since he sheds a LOT. And he is phenomenal with the kids. He doesn't tug hard with them, he tolerates them climbing on him to a point, and I truly believe that if any of his family were in trouble he would do what dogs do to help us.

One of his quirks has always been bedtime. He likes to go to bed by about 10pm. However, very rarely will be go to sleep if anyone is not in their beds. He will sit and stare at us or lay next to us and sigh if we're not going to bed when he wants. He has grown to a rather chunky 89 pounds and doesn't get walked enough. He's never turned down a walk, but I know that after midnight he thinks I'm crazy if I try to take him for a walk with me. And that brings us to tonight and the title of this entry.

I am up to a 40 pound weight loss and very excited about that. I have let my diet slip a lot more lately, simply because I've discovered that I can make some concessions and still lose. Exercise is a key component to that working, though. Today I had a horrible migraine and after Samantha's softball game I didn't feel like cooking so we ate at Pizza Ranch. I did well at first. A large salad, some fruit, and a piece of chicken. Then it went downhill. A yummy piece of pepperoni pizza, 4 breadsticks, and a piece of dessert pizza left me feeling really guilty. When Matt went to bed at midnight, I tried but couldn't sleep. At 12:45 I decided that since it's around 70 degrees out and I love the peace of nighttime, I wanted to take a walk. It's generally agreed that when I go walking after dark I should take the dog with me. Well, the dog and my cell phone. I was laying in bed with Matt and Casey was happily snoozing next to the bed. I got up and casually said "Casey, do you want to go for a walk?" At the word "walk" his ears naturally perk up. He lifted his head and his eyes said "oh, yeah right. You're going to walk? Now?" I got up and he cautiously rose to see if I was serious. I got out socks and he cocked his head as if to ask me. When I got my tennis shoes, he was practically smiling. He was awake and ready to go. He stood by me while I got ready and I think if he had thumbs he would have put his leash on himself. I grabbed my cell phone, MP3 player, a flashlight, and we headed out.

We set a good pace. He's become quite the good walker. I use a 4 foot leash and he walks next to me so nicely it barely tugs. I heard him start breathing harder about 10 minutes in. At 15 minutes he was giving me the "alright, is anyone else really warm?" look. At 20 minutes his tongue was lolled out to the side and I noticed him falling behind me just the slightest bit. We got back to our road after 25 minutes. I expected him to be rushing to get to our yard since he was breathing like he'd just run a marathon. In his defense, it was rainy today and it's still quite humid out. But really. Out of shape much, Dog? We got home at the 30 minute mark and to his credit I will say that as we came up the driveway he gave me the "what? I can keep going. Let's go some more" look. Since I happen to like the dog and don't want to give him a heart attack, I declined and we came inside. We have been home nearly an hour at this point and he's STILL panting hard next to me. But giving me the look asking if we're going to go out more, or if we can go to bed now.

It's as if I can see in his eyes what he's thinking. "Seriously, crazy human. I do love to walk, but could you do it at a normal time? Maybe during the daylight? I mean, if you need a flashlight it's probably too dark." I love my dog and I love that he's so loyal and wonderful. But I do need to get him in shape. I wonder if he'd get used to 1am walks if we did it every night.