Holland and Paris

Greg and I just got home from vacation, and I seriously slept for 12 hours last night, it's amazing how worn out you get from sight-seeing, I definitely prefer those lay on the beach every day and do nothing sort of vacations. But we had a really great time. We flew to Brussels, Belgium where we were picked up from our friends at the airport and drove to Holland. We were staying with friends of ours, Charles and Tineke, who were living in Spain with us, and moved in June. It was awesome, I absolutely loved Holland, there isn't much to the landscape, it's pretty much flat, but it's covered in green and dotted with windmills. It was so beautiful, too bad we missed the tulips, but it was worth the trip anyway. While we were there we were able to visit with our friends, take long bicycle rides, we visited this place called "Madurodam" which is a park with replicas of famous Dutch buildings in miniature, and we even saw Harry Potter!!! Which of course I had been dying without, but I refused to see it dubbed in Spanish.

Riding bikes in Bergen op Zoom

We're Giants!! One of the windmills in Madurodam

Love the wooden shoe =)

Then we hopped on a train and went to Paris, this half of the trip started out quite hectic, we had no idea how the metro worked, but eventually ended up near our hotel when we realized we had no map of the streets and weren't really sure where our hotel was... so we wandered in the general direction for almost a half an hour just hoping we'd stumble upon the small side street where our hotel was, and we actually did, right when we both were about to give up and grab a taxi, we saw a small sign with labeled "Rue Nicolo". Man was it a blessing! Paris was interesting, definitely beautiful in all of the architecture and history, we went to the Louvre, had crepes in front of the Eiffel Tower, took a boat ride down the Seine River, visited the Notre Dame, but it wasn't really what I expected. In my mind Paris is a city where you sit at cafes and drink coffee with a croissant, etc. But when we discovered that a cup of coffee cost 6 euros, and no that isn't Starbucks, it blew me away! Even a soda at a restaurant was at least 5. It was crazy! The food at Disneyland was cheaper than the food in the city.... and that's sayin' something. We celebrated Greg's birthday at Disneyland Paris, we were there for 13 hours, I have a HUGE blister on my foot and Greg's favorite saying became "my dogs is doggin' me" to inform me that his feet hurt. Gotta love him =)

On the ride, "it's a small world"

Greg in front of the Eiffel Tower