Europe 2015: London

During our five-month-long trip planning, I was nervous about London. Kathleen had requested that we separate it from the rest of England, and as the rest of the itinerary fell into place, she ended up asking if we could save London for last. (Until she realized our return flight was through JFK, then it turned [...]

Europe 2015: Ireland (Part 2)

Ahhhh, time to relax with a nice cup of tea, right? If that's not the smuggest mug you've ever seen... Anyway, I left off with us staying with one of our favorite hostesses of the entire trip on the night of 11 July. We were in a small town called Westport in the west of Ireland and [...]

Europe 2015: Ireland (Part 1)

It took me a very long time to edit these photos for this blog post. I had actually gone through and selected almost 200 pictures and had edited/resized half of them when I gave up. I was frustrated with how terrible they were turning out -- as I told Kathleen on the phone the other [...]

Europe 2015: Belgium

I think the Thanksgiving episode of Bob's Burgers summed it up best: Belgium was a pretty big relief from France. The weather was cooler, the people were friendlier, and the general attitude was less frenzied. I talked in my last post about how I'd been looking forward to Switzerland, and how I was heartbroken when we had [...]

Europe 2015: France

This post needs two disclaimers. First: France was not our original plan. Until about two weeks before our departure in May, the plan had been to take the train from Kaiserslautern to Thun, Switzerland. We'd even booked a gorgeous BnB there. When we went to book train tickets, we realized just how expensive it is to [...]