Honeymoon!

As far as honeymoons go, ours was the best. Im sure everyone thinks theirs was the best, but this one truly took the cake. We made the decision to hang out at home for a few days before leaving town. We wanted time to catch up on our sleep, open our gifts, start on thank you notes, pack and of course spend time with our family that was still in town to celebrate our nuptials. By the time we left for our ten day adventure, we had plenty of time to get our bearings and were ready and raring to go by the time we boarded our 9 hour flight.

The Thursday after we tied the knot, we left Austin for the romantic city of Paris. We arrived somewhat early that morning, dropped our bags off at our hotel and immediately found a café where we sat outside and sipped on piping hot coffee. It was drizzly as we expected so armed with our umbrellas, we strolled the streets until we could check into our room. We did all the normal tourist things on the days we spent there: ate crepes, drank countless cups of coffee, took a bazillion pictures, drank many many pints of beer and made friends from all over the world. We saw the Eiffel tower both during the day and at night, saw the Arc De Triomphe, strolled the stores on the Champs- Elysees, stood in line at the Louvre to see Mona and other legends. We loved the city and couldn’t get enough of it. Sadly, we had to stick to our schedule and move on.

We left Paris to see what I dubbed the “sleepy town of Bordeaux”- which is supposedly not so sleepy and more of a college town. What we saw, however, was quite different. We arrived after a few hours on the train and checked into our hotel. Our hotel, I should mention put us up on the 4^th floor and we had no elevator. Derek kindly lugged our two almost fifty pound suitcases all the way up and opened the door to see two twin beds. We had a great laugh at that much, I assure you. By 8 PM despite our best efforts, we couldn’t, for the life of us find much to do or much going on. All the high end shops were closed, the streets were empty and even the restaurants were devoid of all human interaction. We called it an early night in the hopes we would find more to do the next day. We found the city bustling when we awoke and quickly took in all the sights. We drank a ton of Bordeaux wine, shopped at more high end stores we couldn’t afford, ate delicious pasta in a box (Ill tell you more about later but suffice it to say it was one of our favorite meals), and of course we took hundreds more pictures. It was in the city of Bordeaux we spent most of our time drinking delicious wines, learning about all the surrounding vineyards and finally found the night life the night before we left.

Our last stop on our honeymoon was Barcelona. We awoke early on our last day in Bordeaux and boarded the first of many trains and we would ride 2-3 hours before switching to another train (we did this three more times before arriving in Spain). The trains were nice and even roomy but changing trains required dragging our luggage and looking for the correct gate in a language we didn’t know. We both are quite fluent in Spanish but much to our dismay, in Spain they mostly speak Castillian. One we arrived, we immediately felt the buzz wed been told so much about, there were people everywhere! We checked into our amazing hotel which did NOT have twin beds- and we headed out. Over the next 4 days we ate tapas galore, we drank pitchers of sangria, we shopped, took even more pictures and made more friends. We saw Sagrada Familia church, walked Las Ramblas, went to the top of the Christopher Columbus tower that overlooked the city, saw Barcelona Cathedral and of course took in much of the night life. Dinner wasn’t typically until 10 PM or so and we wouldn’t return to our hotel room until 4 or 5 AM.

Needless to say, by day 11 when we boarded our flight home, we were exhausted, arms tired from dragging heavy luggage, eager to hear our native English and feet beaten from miles and miles walked. We had an amazing time together, had a blast learning about other cultures, making friends and are anxious to continue this next chapter of our lives as a married couple!

I, of course have hundreds and hundreds of pictures, so I might put together a slideshow or link a photo album to share them all with you! If you have any suggestions, please feel free to share.

Happy to be home! Ive missed you all!