I’ve been incredibly busy lately. Rushing around all over the place.
My parents were here for a day, as I mentioned in my last post. They went on to Denmark and flew to Luxembourg as my stepmom’s best friend from school lives there with her husband. Hubs and I rented a car to drive down (nothing really wrong with our car, but we needed more room for their and our – story coming – luggage) and on Wednesday afternoon we picked up said automobile at the airport to hit the road.
Something about road trips. You know you are with the right person when some of the best times you have with someone are traveling (that and home improvement, a sure-fire way to test a relationship). We absolutely LOVE traveling together. We have a GREAT time. Sure there’s the occasional squabble over directions “do you want to drive or are you going to let me?!” and the where-do-you-want-to-eat-I don’t-know-where-do-YOU-want-to-eat situations but for the rest we get on like a house on fire. The minute we are on the road we are on “holiday”. Even if that holiday is an overnighter somewhere or a weekend away.
So we went down to Luxembourg City on Wednesday evening, which is a four hour drive through the Netherlands and Belgium and specifically the Ardennes. It’s a beautiful area but of course it was late and we couldn’t really see much. But we laughed and listened to music and stopped along the way to eat dinner (Pizza Hut Express; not my favourite but what are you going to do?).
We arrived at our Hotel in Luxembourg, appropriately called Hotel Italia (?), managed to get parking, checked-in, and situated and then walked over to a little square with a few pubs to have a beer. After a four hour drive one needs a beer to chill out and relax; you can’t be expected to jump straight in the bed like good little boys and girls do!
We went to sleep around midnight, woke up at 8 am, had breakfast (not my favourite again but certainly these continental breakfasts are for carb lovers! lots and lots of bread, croissants, jam, Nutella, that sort of thing) and then headed over to pick up my parents. We then spent the next several hours in the car, talking, laughing, waxing and waning philosophically at times. We stopped in Belgium for coffee and petrol, in Limburg for late lunch (they were hell bent on pannenkoeken yet when we finally found a Dutch Pancake House they weren’t super impressed with how it looked!) and then went to Arnhem so they could see where we live (our apartment AND the city).
We gave them a little tour (the apartment takes two seconds), dad and Hubs chatted about nerdy things, stepmom stroked the cats, and we did some practical things as well like getting them all checked in for their flight the next day. We then did a little round of the city, at least the parts we know and headed off to dinner at our favourite Greek restaurant in Arnhem. Great dinner, great company, a great day and evening all in all.
We took them to their hotel afterwards (which they LOVED) and said goodnight. We arrived home very shortly thereafter and went to bed with the intention of getting up early (enough) to pack for our own trip to England. They had to catch a 2pm flight back to the US and we were off to London at 3pm.
With that I’ll leave you and post Part I and perhaps even some photographs if I can get it all together at around the same time.