The Epic European Trip

As you may or may not know, I've just returned from a three week trip to Europe with the whole family! A couple of years ago we drove across the country and called it The Big Trip. Well, this latest trip we  are now calling The Epic Trip! My daughter went to Spain in April for a study abroad program, and so we decided when she was done we would pick her up and travel around with her a bit before all coming back to real life.

So that's what we did! It was crazy, and fun, and stressful, and exhausting and thrilling and.... all of it. We saw a bit of Madrid, then three days in Barcelona, four days in San Sebastian (we have a friend there that we visited), six days in Paris and then four more days in London. Whew! It flew by much much too fast and feels all like a blur now. But hopefully we created a some memories and showed our kids a little bit of the world.

We tried a new thing this trip and that was to rent and stay in local apartments instead of hotels. We used a website many of you have probably heard of, but it was all new to us... airbnb.com. Anyway, this made for quite the different experience, and it was so fun! Much more affordable for our big(ish) family than hotels, and fun to be right in the local neighborhood, shopping for breakfast groceries at the local market, coming home at night with the local people. Awesome. There were, however, some things I missed (not necessarily from hotels, but just from home) which I'll post about later, just because I find those things to be quite interesting.

Anyway, here's a few (but probably too many!) pictures of the adventure and some of the places we stayed:

This is just after we meet up with the daughter who had been in Spain for 6 weeks already.

We rode a lot of trains. I loved it.
(Except for the metros/tubes, I got really sick of those!)

Wading in the Mediterranean Sea in Barcelona.

A view of the famous beach in San Sebastian

With our friend Ane, in San Sebastian

Walking walking walking, always walking!

The view out our balcony window in Madrid.

The view down the street where we stayed in Barcelona.

Paris as seen from from the towers of Notre Dame

The Eiffel Tower is awesome at night.

A cool sun shot of the London Eye

And another cool sun shot of Big Ben

The house were we stayed in London, near Wimbledon

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona

Just some of the stuff Ane's mom fed us

The family at Notre Dame

Love this shot of the Louvre Pyramid at sunset

The Tour Eiffel!

You all know what the Mona Lisa looks like,
but did you know what the crowd observing her looks like?
CRAZY!!

The beautiful gardens at Versailles.
So clean and pristine that my son thought it looked like a fake backdrop for a movie

The catacombs in Paris, where they've moved tons of skeletons form graveyards
and have done artwork with them.

More Eiffel Tower!
(A rare "whole family" picture.)

Sunset over Paris from the top of the tower.
(Wait, not the top! The second level. We didn't go to the top.)

Well anyway. I guess that gives a little feel of what I've been up to the last three weeks! It's good, sad and a bit weird to be home!