Travel Report #2

I never had another chance to post on the road -- I was too busy having fun. It's weird to think that the first post I did was in an internet cafe near Leicester Square on the night they found that first car bomb right near there. We had just seen Avenue Q -- so great. I'll give a few highlights of the trip.

Leamington Spa: It was great staying with a fabulous family who opened their home to us. I loved playing American football and British rugby with the boys. (Kristin and I brought back rugby balls from Lilywhites -- a sports store). Visiting the Cadbury factory was so cool -- it smelled like baking brownies the whole time. Watching British shows like Dr. Who and Coronation Street was great, too bad we don't get Dr. Who over here. We saw the Leamington Spa museums and Warwick Castle, including the Ghost Tower where ghosts jumped out of dark corners at you -- I almost peed my pants. We had a chocolate tasting at the house that Kristin and I loved.

Amsterdam: I was disappointed that Amsterdam was so rainy and cold the time we were in the city. The one day we went out to Zaanse Schans, a working Dutch village / museums, was our only non-rainy day. We saw cheese making, wooden shoe carving, and a working windmills there. In town, we saw the van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank house, the Dutch Resistance Museum, a diamond cutting display, and the Heineken Brewery tour. We ate enormous pancakes and stroopwafels (like two flat, round waffle cone sandwiching caramel or syrup) and we stayed in a boat hotel -- the Botel. Vondelpark was too rainy to visit -- too bad.

Paris: I have a new appreciation for Paris. This city offered the best array of cheap food on the trip. Of course, if Kristin and I had had the funds to sit down at five star restaurants in every city, we could say they all have fabulous food. Paris has fabulous food at every level -- the corner cafe, the street vendor crepe, the boulangerie baguette and gooey almond crescent. Wow! Plus, the art blew me away, and we only saw a small bit of it. The size of the Louvre is so immense and the building is a piece of art itself. Mona Lisa was OK, but turn around from her and see "The Wedding Feast at Cana," an enormous, grand painting for a better view. I love the Orsay Museum best because the building, an old train station, allowed for natural light through the opaque glass to show onto the Impressionist painting. I really love Gaugin more than before and the primitivist painters were my style as well. Next trip to Paris, I'll make my way to the Rodin Museum, filled with sculptures. We also climbed the 700 stairs to the Eiffel Towers second platform, climbed the nearly 300 steps of the Arch d'Triomphe, climbed the 400 stairs of the Notre Dame (to get heavily rained on during our 5 minutes at the panoramic view level). We saw the inside of Notre Dame, Saint Chappelle, the outside of the Pompidou center and its famous fountain. We walked the Champs d'Elleises (spelling?), bought shoes, and shopped around town. Kristin loved Paris the most. I got over the French attitudes after being yelled at by the bus station lady, and I have a new appreciation for the city.

Back to London: Our final visit to London had us skipping sleep for a few last activities. We spent the morning finding Dirty Dancing musical tickets, which was our trip finale. What a fun show, with amazing dancers and Johnny the lead had a body that made you think you were at a Chippendales performance (along with all the screaming, feasting women in the audience). The woman who played Baby did it so perfectly. We also took in Picadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, and the Tate Modern that day. We stocked up on Cadbury for a few months to ween ourselves off it. Our trip gets an A for fun and memorable times, a D for weather (at least it wasn't a heat wave, though), and an honorable mention for sketchy bus rides in the middle of the night.