Brace Yourself...

The long awaited (ok, maybe it's just been on my to-do list forever; I realize no one is waiting with baited breath) honeymoon blog is here.

I think these big blogs (wedding, honeymoon, etc.) are the hardest to write because they will never do the event justice.  And I don't want to bore you all with a laundry list of what we did.

And then I thought about it and as much as this blog is written for others to feel caught up on my life it's also written for me to look back on and see, documented, the important steps in my life.

So, here we go....

Thanks to my very smart husband, and knowing that Hurricane Sandy could impact our connection in NY, he rebooked us the day before our honeymoon to fly through Minnesota. While it took us longer to get to Spain - we got there and did not have to deal with weather issues.

Our first 2 nights were spent in Barcelona, where Carl's family is from and his grandmother, aunt and some cousins still live.  Our very jet lagged selves spent our first afternoon with his grandmother, who doesn't speak any English.  Even if I wasn't jet lagged I would have found it hard to keep up. I just succombed to nodding eventually and that seemed ok.  The large plate of paella that she fed us, while delicious, was only inducing a food coma on top of my jet lag.

After forcing ourselves to stay up late, go out to eat and have some wine (duh) we slept for 12 hours that first night.  It was amazing!  Not only that I slept that long but that we could. We had no agenda, no schedule, no one waiting for us. The day was our oyster!  

And this theme continued for the next 12 days.  We knew how long we were going to be in each city and some of the things we wanted to do there but it wasn't overly planned (shocking I know).  We quickly accustomed to the Spanish lifestyle of pastries for breakfast, wine at lunch, afternoon naps and then late dinners.  I thought this would be hard to adjust to since I'm often in bed by 9pm, which is when we'd head out to dinner in Spain. Turns out, when in Spain......

After our 2 days in Barcelona, we rented a car and drove north to the Rioja (wine) country.  This is the Basque territory, close to France and the northern coast. We stayed in a small town (of note: where there was a Marriott) but spent our days driving around the countryside - going to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, tapas/pincho hopping in San Sebastian and enjoying many, many wine tastings.  

Both Carl and I agreed this was our favorite part of the trip. The food was best here, the wine was a plenty, the people seemed friendlier.   All in all it was delightful.

We drove to Madrid for just one night. Due to a delayed start, a rainy drive and then an even rainier night in Madrid, I can’t say we experienced much here besides a delicious meal and nice hotel.  Maybe next time?

Then we were off, by plane, to the Canary Islands.  Side note, packing for this trip was hard. We experienced temperatures as cold as 30 and rainy and as warm as 85 and sunny.  

This part of our trip was certainly the most outdoorsy. We spent the day on a (naked – sorry parents) beach, walked around the town, hiked down an old volcano and drove around the hillside.  There was more history here than I expected, though, and it was beautiful and a nice change of pace from tapas to seafood.  Even I was growing a bit tired of bread and cheese. But not wine!

After our 3 nights in the Canary Islands we flew back to the Spain mainland for our last 2 nights. What should have been a 4 hour plane ride turned into an all day airport experience.  It took us over 14 hours to get back to Malaga and we lost an entire day there.  Malaga is close to where another of Carl’s cousins lives and we did get to see her, eat some great last meals and spend our last night reflecting back on what a great trip it was.

Our last day we departed separately – Carl back to the US and me to Australia for a work trip.  Our flights were about 12 hours apart and I was looking forward to a day of sight seeing on my own.  It didn’t quite happen that way. I was an emotional wreck – from saying goodbye to my husband to knowing I was re-entering the work world, it was a tough day.  I’m so grateful that Devon was in Australia and greeted me back into the real world. More on that trip later….

As with most things, I like to take note (and make lists) of the ways in which Spain had its unique characteristics.  Things like:

1.    They serve potato chips as appetizers (their version of chips and salsa?)

2.    They eat tuna (as in cold tuna fish out of a can) on their salads.  Gross.

3.    Their salads also only consist of ice berg lettuce, the aforementioned tuna, raw onions and tomatoes. Double gross.

4.    It is clear why they are going bankrupt – they are very inefficient and have lines everywhere with no one actually available to help you. Most likely because they are on a break somewhere.

5.    They are very polite and kind, which is a great thing but also means no one uses their horn.  Not ideal when driving in a city like Madrid.

But there were many things I loved about the trip as well. Too many to name.  Of course spending that much time with Carl, post-wedding, not thinking about work and not having access to email were the highlights. And while I loved being with Carl so much and we got along great, you do run out of things to talk about. Thank goodness we brought our iPad. We played tons of trivial pursuit and monopoly and watched movies when we could stream.  

So thanks for your patience while I wrote this blog (and in reading it).  I know I’ll never experience a trip like this, again, so I’m happy to know I can reflect back on the pictures and words I used to describe it.