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!