Europe Trip Days 1-3

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind. You may remember me talking about buying tickets for our Europe trip the day we found out April was pregnant. Well that is where we have been the last 13 days. We went with our good friends Andy and Lisa and had a blast. We really weren't sure we were even going to be able to make it there. The whole volcanic ash thing came about and no flights were going into London for over a week straight. When we landed, they announced that our flight was the first US Airways flight to land at London Heathrow airport in over a week. We were very lucky to have made it at all.

We started off the trip with 2 days in an English city called Bath. It is about a 2 hour drive west of London. We stayed at a cute little B&B and had an authentic English breakfast each morning. Andy was especially excited to get his "beans on toast". Yes, that's baked beans for breakfast...the rest of us stuck to more "normal" foods like eggs, bacon, porridge and of course the girls had their English tea. We spent the first day touring Bath which has a lot of ancient Roman history and architecture. A very pretty city with lots of quaint shops. We had our first pasty which is like a pie crust folder over on itself, stuffed with all sorts of different fillings. You choose the filling of course. Andy and Lisa thought I was crazy because I just called them glorified hot pockets. We also had our first authentic fish & chips which by the way is served by the same shop that serves Chinese food, by Chinese people. Not quite what we had imagined as "English Fish & Chips" but still very good.

The next day we drove and saw Stonehenge. It was amazing to see in person. We then visited a little English city named Wells. It had a gorgeous cathedral, cobblestone roads, an old castle with a moat and people playing croquet on the lawn -- exactly what you would envision in an English countryside city. We then saw the Cheddar Gorge which is where water had cut a ravine through a mountain and formed this beautiful gorge with tons of caves. They found that the caves were had the ideal humidity and temperature to make cheese and they claim that cheddar cheese originated here.

Ok...so that is just the first 3 days...more details to come including visiting Andy's family, London, and Paris.

P.S. - it was really hard to choose photos. April took over 1000 - maybe the rest will make it on facebook at some point.