To Europe We Go

Ok, first I want to start this off with a disclaimer.  Those of you that follow me both here and on social media networks know that I travel a lot, and that I talk about traveling a lot.  And I know that some of you may be unable to travel a lot, but would like to.  And I know some of you get sick of hearing me talk about traveling.  I just want to clarify that none of my posts about traveling are intended to brag or try to make anyone jealous or anything like that.  It’s honestly just something I enjoy and that I enjoy talking about.  It’s my hobby, my pastime that I prefer to spend my money on.  Some people have kids.  I don’t.  Some people have other hobbies, like cars, that they spend their money on.  I don’t.  This is my hobby, my thing, that’s why I talk about it.  For me.  Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on.

In two days, the boyfriend and I will be leaving for what some people might consider the vacation of a lifetime.  It didn’t really sink into me exactly how epic it is until I was browsing on TripAdvisor the other day and came across their 2012 Top 25 Destinations in the World.  Yeah, we are visiting 3 out of the top 4 on our vacation this time.  (The fourth one is New York City, which we’ve already been to a couple of times.)  Can’t get much better than that!

We leave on Friday evening on a jet plane bound for London.  We lucked out and our flight is straight from Phoenix to London, our first destination.  We will be spending three nights in London, three nights in Paris, and three nights in Rome.  Oh, and also while we are in Paris, we are taking a day trip to Brussels, Belgium.  Needless to say, there are a ton of things to see in all of these places, so I’m sure we will stay very busy and will get a lot of walking in.  We have already been informed by various friends and acquaintances of the long lists of places that they recommend.  It makes me exhausted just thinking about it!

One reason this trip is pretty epic for both of us is that I have been to none of the places we are going before, and Ricky has only been to one – Paris.  And he absolutely loved it.  So much so that our entire living room is decorated in Paris-themed decor.  (That’s where I got the picture at the top of the page – it’s on a table in a corner of our living room.)  When we moved in together, that actually worked out, because my bathroom had been decorated in a Paris/travel theme.  I had bought this shower curtain that had drawings of iconic landmarks in various world cities on it, including Paris with the Eiffel Tower.  I then had taken an old calendar with black and white photos of Paris in it, framed the photos, and hung them up in the bathroom to match the shower curtain.  Some of those photos are now a part of our living room decor with Ricky’s stuff.  The shower curtain, while we don’t use it anymore, has been saved because we had a lot of conversations about it and the places on it that we had been to and hoped to go.  In the time I had it, I added several cities from it to the list of places I’d visited, Moscow and New York among them.  It’s become kind of a goal of ours to one day say we have been to “all of the cities on the shower curtain”.  With a bit of luck, maybe we’ll make it to all of them in time.  I’m pretty sure after this trip, we’re over halfway there!

So off we go on Friday after work, ready to take a Tylenol PM and sleep on our nine-hour flight across the pond.  I’m sure I will have plenty of pictures to follow in the next several weeks.  But until then, goodbye, au revoir, and arrivederci!