London Day 2

Well our trip started out with a bang. It was actually a great way to start out the trip because when I arrived at the apartment (about an hour after the blog post) Natali and I had a great laugh and a great story. It also helped with the jet lag because it certainly woke us up. So I learned the first rule of traveling: don't hop blindly on a train when it is warning that the doors are closing when you and your wife are carrying luggage and your wife is behind you and is smaller than 5'3.

So we walked around for a bit after that, going to Buckingham Palace and St James Park where we rested for a bit (pictures added in previous post). We were proud of ourselves for staying up until 9:00 PM. Natali suggested that we set an alarm but both of our phones were dead so I assumed we would be able to wake up at a decent hour for our only full day in London. BIG MISTAKE. We ended up sleeping in (I won't even say the time because it is embarrassing) and rushed out the door. I learned the second rule of traveling: ALWAYS set an alarm because after an all-night flight you might be surprised at how long you can sleep.

Our first stop was the British Museum.

We focused on the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek rooms because that is what Rick Steve's audio guides focus on and we like to be able to have a little history to what we are seeing. Here are a few of the highlights:

The Rosetta Stone! I learned British in a single day with this stone! You all probably think that is rubbish but I assure you I learned loads of new words. Now I can add British to the list of languages that I know. Brilliant! 

And finally, Ginger. Known as Ginger because of his "wifts of curly red hair" on his head. Who ever thought Egyptians could be red heads? It was interesting that it was just the desert sand that mummified Ginger. 

We couldn't go to London without trying to find something "Harry Potterish" so we set of to King's Cross. We found Platform 9 3/4 with a huge line to take a picture with a cart that was sticking out of the wall. Because of our limited time, we just took a picture of a random person up with the cart.

Navigating around London was great fun. Natali got embarrassed every time I busted out my handy dandy map so she had to take a picture. For lunch we stopped at Marks and Spencer and got a couple of pasta salads and I got a sandwich. Natali was skeptical because the sandwich I got was a cheese and onion sandwich. It turned out to be surprisingly good.

Next up was the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. I love bridges. Natali might even tell you I am a little obsessed with them. We have a "game" where if we see a bridge the first one to say "bridge" wins. It doesn't matter if you see it in a movie or in real life. Play this sometime and you will notice that bridges are everywhere.  My love of bridges made seeing the Tower Bridge really cool. It is a very unique bridge and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Because of time restraints we were not able to go inside the Tower of London. 

 

We then went to a museum called Tate Modern. Natali told me that it was a modern art gallery for the "Philistines" (she read that online) so I was a little nervous going in. I'm not a big fan of abstract "art" but I went in with an open mind. We would each go and look at a piece of art and read the history behind it. Then we would tell the other about the artwork that we were now so familiar with. It made it very interesting. This is what we found. 

This represents travelers jostling each other after a long trip. So in seven weeks we will probably look something like this (maybe only when jostled?). 

The artist's explanation next to this painting read "Load the brush and draw a line. At the beginning it will appear dark and thick, then it will get gradually thinner and finally disappear..." What more can I say?

Look at the picture above closely and tell me what you see. This work of art was called "Melted Elephant" just for a hint ;).

This was probably our favorite painting in the exhibit that we saw. If you are thinking that it looks like a little kid painted the picture then you are almost correct. The artist named this "Painting for my Son" and is a collection of the painter's favorite paintings that his son made for him as a child.

Then we went to the whole reason we came to London, Wicked. Natali loves broadway plays. I had not been to a Broadway play before meeting Natali but I now can claim to have gone to 5 broadway plays. Natali has gone to loads more than I have but had never seen Wicked. I had heard many of the songs from Wicked (often on repeat in the car as Natali sung at the top of her lungs). We were both excited but Natali was happier than a munchkin with a lollipop.

The play was amazing. I think Natali described it best with one word when she told me why she loves Broadway plays: Perfection. It is one of the few places where you can see pure perfection. It is amazing to see the work of people that are so talented and work so hard to put on something truly perfect for all of us to enjoy. I enjoyed other plays that I have seen like Les Miserable or Lion King but Wicked was on another level. It might have been because I have grown to love the songs that Natali loves to sing on road trips in the car. Or maybe it was the familiarity with the Land of Oz from childhood. Whatever the case I would suggest seeing Wicked in London should be on everyone's bucket list.

Europe Trip- Just Roll With It

So I'm sitting here in our room in London alone hoping Reed will hear the telepathic messages I'm trying to send him telling him that I found our room and I haven't been kidnapped. I figured now would be a good time for a quick blogpost about the motto for our Europe trip: "Just Roll With It." I picked this motto a few months ago when I was agonizing over all the millions of things that could go wrong on this trip. I decided that with a trip this long and complicated, we are bound to run into a number of bumps along the way and I didn't want to let those bumps ruin what would otherwise be the vacation of a lifetime. So today when Reed hopped onto a train at the London-Gatwick airport and the doors closed IMMEDIATELY behind him before I could get on, I knew that my "Just Roll With It" motto would need to be implemented sooner than I had hoped.

You see, the Gatwick airport is actually 30 minutes via express train from the London city center and 2 hours via bus. Reed and I decided it was worth the extra money to take the train. So with luggage in tow we headed off to catch the nearest train. Unfortunately there were a number of train lines and we weren't entirely sure which one we were supposed to take. But as Reed read through the destination boards he said "Oh London, Victoria! That's where we need to go!" and he scurried off to the nearest train headed in that direction. Although the train was about to leave, Reed was lucky and fast enough to catch it. Unfortunately, I was not so lucky. And as Reed turned around on the train to talk to his cute little wife (that's me), he found himself instead staring at some smelly bearded man with his wife trapped outside the doors of the train. His eyes widened and jaw dropped once he saw me out there waving (ever so sadly) at him but the train was already on the move. So without a plan for how to meet, no cell phones, and without knowing where we were headed (Reed had all addresses and everything), I boarded the next train to "London, Victoria."

I thought surely Reed would wait at the train station for me but as I looked around my train I realized it looked much different than the metro style train Reed boarded. So I actually was none too surprised when I arrived at the train station and my husband was nowhere to be seen. I think he must have taken a regular metro while I took the express train, which would take much longer and who even knows if his train went to the same station as mine. I thought I would wait at the train station hoping he would find me but it was creepy, huge, and I hadn't used a bathroom since before our 10 hour flight...so I hoped for a miracle and hopped on my computer to see if I could piggyback on someone's free wifi to find the apartment address. Well by some miracle I was able to get wifi. So I got the apartment address and even a google map of the location. Then by some additional (and even more impressive) miracle, I actually was able to navigate the streets of London on my own to find our apartment. So there you have it. Reed and I have been separated for about 2.5 hours now and I'm just praying he checks his email somewhere or he thinks to come to the apartment. I'm actually not too worked up about it yet...I even laughed about it a bit on the train...but we will see if my "just roll with it" motto holds up if another hour passes...

The Lake!--Sand Hollow Reservoir and Quail lake

First of all, this blogpost is about the photos. I'll try to give some explanations here and there but really, the photos are the feature presentation :-). This summer we were lucky enough to be able to go to the lake a number of times with my sister Dana and her husband Jason on their new boat. We always had a blast. Unfortunately, due to studying for the bar and otherwise being busy, we were unable to go as much as we wanted to but we still made some great memories :-).

These first pictures were taken one beautiful Friday evening on the lake when myself and two of my sisters got in a random picture taking mood. It started with my little sister Tracie modeling for some instagram shots and then Dana and I wanted to join the game :-). We actually took an embarrassingly large number of pictures but let's pretend we only took these two haha. This silhouette one is overly dramatic haha but I think it's a really cool photograph anyways! I'm in the middle on the silhouette one in case you can't tell :-).

TUBING
Next up are a number of pictures we took on a Saturday when Jaimee (my marine sister) came to visit for the weekend. The water was choppy so we mostly just tubed. I usually love tubing but we tied the rope on the boat instead of the tower and I realized I don't like that quite as much because you don't get as much air and you get splashed in the face more. Also, the water was (in my opinion) freezing. In these first pictures with Reed and Tracie, I love that as Tracie starts to fall off, you can see Reed reaching out to try and save her. Although he was unfortunately not successful, I still think it's cute that he tried :-).

You will see that Jayden was obviously pretty proud of himself for staying on longer than Sam during the first run :-). They both got thrown epically off the tube during the second run but we didn't capture that on camera (thank goodness because my mom probably would not have liked seeing how high Jayden flew :-S).

There are SO many awesome photos of everyone on the tubes but I'm trying not to overload the blog with too many photos, so I'm having to just use a few from each run. But know that it breaks my heart.

Other Random Lake (and after-lake) Shots: First is of my sisters and me after getting home from the lake. After that is a shot of me wakesurfing (or trying) for the first time. I actually got up on my first try and stayed up for a decent amount of time. After the first attempt I was able to stay up pretty easily but was always too chicken to let go of the rope. Maybe another time... 

This last shot is a pretty cool one of Reed wakeboarding...though this was taken AFTER he split his head open doing a flip on the wakeboard so I don't know why he is so high...he promised he wasn't going to be crazy anymore :-/.

Anyways, I think that is enough of the lake pictures. We have had so much fun going with Dana and Jason to the lake this summer. Thanks for taking us you guys!! 

Hopefully another blog is coming soon because we are trying to get caught up before we leave for Europe!

Disneyland

Well we are way behind (as usual) so I'm just going to start tackling one post at a time. Soo...Here we go.... After graduation, but before I started studying for the bar, Reed and I decided to take a quick trip to the happiest place on Earth.

We had one unfortunate hiccup in our trip because we were cheapskates and booked a cheap hotel. The room smelled bad and somewhat resembled a prison cell, the beds were hard and people were talking outside our hotel room all night. So needless to say, I got no sleep. The next morning we knew we needed to change hotels so we had to pay a fee and then pay the increased costs for a new hotel. We definitely ended up spending more than we would have had we just paid for the nicer hotel in the first place. Moral of the story is...when you try to be a cheapskate, you end up paying more to fix the problem than you would have had you just paid more originally (this is not the first time this has happened to us but hopefully we have finally learned from our mistake).

After this hotel situation was taken care of, however, the rest of our trip was smooth sailing and Disneyland made us forget all about our rocky start :-).

First off you'll see the Courthouse I REALLY wish I could practice at with my new law degree :-). Next is the old office manager lady from Monster's Inc. It was funny/creepy when I was taking this picture at the end of the ride and she said "Young lady in the third row, make sure to get my good side" Haha (yes I was sitting in the third row). Was it just coincidence or was someone controlling her and watching me? I guess we will never know. Next up are pictures of Reed and I just hanging out in Toontown and Reed doing his signature pose in front of Buzz Lightyear (He didn't look this happy after the ride...more on that to come).

It was really fun to visit the new Cars Land while we were there. The lines for all the rides were ridiculously long though (well like 60-70 minutes...some people don't think that is too long). But we did get to go twice on Radiator Racers, the most popular ride, and it was a blast (ride pictured below without us and then a pic of us in the car). They have a "single rider" line that is a much shorter wait so we figured we would just sit apart so we could at least go on the ride. But then through a strange turn of events we ended up sitting right next to each other! So we waited less than half the amount of time and still got to sit together! We thought that was a pretty great deal. The second time we got split up but it was actually really fun because we ended up being in the two cars that race each other at the end of the ride (my car won! Woo!). They switch up which car wins each time so you never know who is going to win. It's really fun.

After our first day at Disneyland we wanted to go out for some Middle Eastern food because it's so hard to find in Utah and they have fantastic Middle Eastern places in California. We found this little hole-in-the-wall-esque place and it was FANTASTIC. They started us out with some really delicious complimentary soup, olives, and pickled beats. Then we ordered Hummus, Labneh and lamb shanks that came with the most incredible Tatzika I have ever tasted (lamb shanks and Tatziki not pictured). If you have never tried Middle Eastern food, I highly recommend it.

These next two pictures are on my all-time favorite kids ride: The Little Mermaid. It's fairly new and is in California Adventure. Really, it is so awesome. They try to create the illusion that the whole ride is under water by having everything floating (even Ariel's hair looks like it is floating around her head). The colors are SO beautiful. Disney is really stepping it up on their kid rides :-).

As usual, Reed and I wore ponchos on the Grizzly Rapids ride. People are always like "Why didn't I think of that?!" But I think it kind of embarrasses Reed haha.

Traditional Splash Mountain Picture: (Splash Mountain is my favorite "big kids" ride with Tower of Terror coming in a close second).

We read really great things about this Southern/New Orleans restaurant in Disneyland so we decided to try it out. Their famous sandwich is called a Monte Cristo...it was pricey but yummy and extremely unique. It was basically and grilled ham and cheese sandwich inside a donut (beignet) and they serve it with like a jam dipping sauce haha. Ya it sounds so weird but it was really good! I could only handle like a fourth of it though because it was so rich and I'm no super into the sweet&salty thing but Reed loved it.

And here we are waiting for It's a Small World. Disney did a complete redesign of It's A Small World and it is really incredible. They take you through the most colorful elaborate displays representing each country around the world (they even have flying carpets in the Middle Eastern area) and they have random Disney characters hidden throughout the whole ride. It's now one of my favorite kids rides as well (it was really bright and I was too lazy to get my sunglasses out of the bag so that's why I'm squinting so bad).

So I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland? Basically it's like an arcade game where you have a little gun and you shoot at targets throughout the ride and then you get a score at the end. Reed and I went on the ride last time and I seriously killed him in points so he insisted on a rematch this time and of course I creamed him again AND again (he wanted another rematch haha). I'm not even exaggerating. You can ask Reed...I more than doubled his score every time haha. We didn't bet anything except bragging rights so I'm making full use of those hard-earned rights right now :-).

Of course what is a Disney vacation without a Turkey leg?! So obviously we had to devour one before we went to the incredible World of Color water show (we posted a video last year). Unfortunately we didn't take pictures of the water show...Reed took some videos but the ones from last year are better anyways cause our seats were a little better last time.

As always, Disneyland was amazing. I just love everything about it and I'm not afraid to admit it :-). Just writing this post makes me want to go back!