Postcards and Passports

 Going to keep this short and sweet because 1. I’m somewhere in between exhausted pigeon and sleeping beauty (- the whole prince who kisses me to wake me up from my slumber part). 2. There’s only so many details that I could tell you about our 24,000+ steps day. Needless to say a few days of bad jet lag and now I’m finally feeling a bit normal. Today we spent the day exploring the city. We got to see the Notre-Dame Cathedral in its current state of repair, the Arc de Triomphe, as well as many other various city sights. We also got to visit the Eiffel Tower in which if you spent any time in my house specifically my bedroom from ages 12-28 you know is a pretty darn big deal. I loved every second of it and only regret not taking Angie’s picture out of my bag to document it all.  Unfortunately Paris has has riots for the past few days after a police officer shot and killed a 17 year old at a routine traffic stop so the city hasn’t been the safest. We visited the Eiffel Tower duri...

  London to Paris We slept in in an attempt to kick any jet lag to the curb. We made it up by 9:45 and were out the door by 10:30ish.    The weight of my backpack gave me flashbacks to last summer’s Camino walk. Achy back and suitcase in tow we headed to London.    A few    train stops away and then we headed straight for the train station so we could check our bags and not lug them around with us all over the streets of London. 3 bag check places later we finally found a spot that had room. The smell of this place resembled a mix of body odor and a potentially decomposing body but in every effort to not lug around 2 suitcases and 2 backpacks we were desperate. Spent the next few hours wandering London, going to see the Crown Jewels and then made our way back to the train station for our journey to Paris. Here’s where things started to get a bit interesting. Due to the long queue at the station our train left later than it was supposed to. We had booke...

 6 am airport shuttle pick up then a quick 2 1/2 hour flight to London from Keflavík, Iceland. We went to bed at 11:20 and set an alarm for 5:40 am with our bags packed and clothes ready to throw on. It’s cute how naive we were. Essentially we woke up at 1:45 wide awake from our brief nap. By 3 we had admitted defeat and just planned to stay awake hoping maybe we could get at least a little nap in on the plane. No luck. Our flight landed about a half an hour late and we made our way to the train to go meet Kristi at her work. Unfortunately, two separate trains we were taking terminated before our stop unexpectedly, and we were forced to get off and navigate on our own. And I don’t think that was either of our strong suits. After what should’ve been an hour and turned into over hours later we finally made it to Kristi’s work. Thank God her work had showers because we were exhausted and sweaty from the trek. We finished getting ready and stored our stuff and then went off to a tradit...