Honjeymoon

We’ve been back from our honeymoon for a little over a week now. After spending nearly two full weeks in hotel rooms and surrounded by stimuli, it’s taking a little while to get back to our normal routines. The trip was great. We had a blast in Europe. I felt sick on our day of departure and spent the first 10 hours or so in London lying in bed, but after that I was ready to go. We spent three nights in London and four in Paris.

After seeing Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, walking over the Tower Bridge and “enjoying” a walking tour on the London Bridge (Amy really wanted to do it, but it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, so to speak), we had an amazing dinner at a place called the Cinnamon Club. It was a fine-dining Indian restaurant in Old Westminster Abbey Library. The food was exquisite and the service was top-notch (Thanks Kerri!). Other London highlights include getting buckets of rain dumped on us at Hyde Park, bangers and mash, pints of beer at noon, amazing hamburgers (made the French way, they told us), and the Royal marching band warming up with a really swingin’ version of When the Saints Go Marching In.

As the Eurostar train made it through the chunnel to the other side, we noticed that there was a good chance the weather was going to be much improved for the rest of our trip. It definitely was better, as it was sunny every single day in Paris. Staying in Montparnasse, we weren’t quite in the heart of the city, but we enjoyed being in what felt like a “real” neighborhood (at least to a certain extent it was). We were able to walk to the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tour Eiffel, and the Latin Quarter and come back to Montparnasse at the end of the day and find food stores and patisseries that weren’t jammed with tourists.

Highlights of Paris for us included the Musee d’Orsay, the Luxembourg Gardens, walking along the banks of the Seine, cheap and good wine, cassoulet, the cheese course (!), Crepes on the go, the Metro (cheap and quick), and feeling like we accomplished something every time we successfully used a French word to buy something. Lowlights include having our first married fight under the Tour Eiffel, tiny, tiny cups of coffee for 2 euros, and me leaving my cell phone in our hotel room as we left to come back to the U.S.

Pictures to come!