Brugges

After our quick morning of sight-seeing in Brussels, we headed out for Brugges.

Belgium is a very tiny country:

We took a train from Brussels, in the center, up to Brugges which is very close to the coast.  It took about an hour with a few stops on the way.

Remember how I said before that Belgium has 2 primary languages, French and Dutch?  The primary language changes where you are in the country.  This affects the signage around the towns, in the train stations, etc.  French is the primary language in Brussels, but Dutch is the primary language in Brugges.  Therefore, everyone speaks English and signs are usually in 2 languages-primary language and English.  While I am sure it must be frustrating to have your country divided on this sort of issue, it makes it a breeze to get around as an English speaking traveler.  No worries about muddling about in a foreign language until someone offers to speak English; you can just start your conversation in English.  Fabulous.  :)

Brugges is a tourist destination because of it's unique quaintness.  It is a major tourist destination and yes, it did feel a bit like that.  However, it's adorable!

You know, people really do ride bikes EVERYWHERE in Belgium.  This began because for a major part of the 20th century, Belgium was a very poor country.  Major battles of both WWI and WWII took place here and the country and its people were just broke afterwards.  Cars were too expensive and so people biked everywhere.  It has remained a major form of transportation, particularly because Belgians also enjoy their beer and so would choose to bike rather than drive their cars after indulging.  However, the country has begun to crack down on this form of "driving" while intoxicated and if caught biking while drunk, it is possible to lose your driver's license (your ACTUAL driver's license).

For some reason, I just fell in love with this house.  It made me think of a childhood book about a little rag doll named Ivy who lived in a house covered with ivy.  So sweet!

There are many things to do in Brugges.  Churches, a belltower to climb, a beautiful Markt (market square), numerous shops, canals, bike tours, the list goes on and on.  We did several of these activities as we could, including seeing a Michelangelo sculpture in one of these beautiful churches.

Here's the real deal about our time in Brugges.  Up until we arrived in Europe, they had been having a very dry, very hot summer.  The day we arrived, so did the rain and the cold.  We did not take as many photos in Brugges as we did in other cities, since it was straight up pouring for most of the time.  We did not go on the countryside bike tour we had planned.  We did not do all the wandering we planned on doing.  We went on a canal cruise, which rained for the entire time of it and our "view" largely consisted of the underside of our umbrella.  We weren't able to enjoy a few of the cafes we wanted to because as soon as began raining, the tourists fled inside.  Anywhere inside and not necessarily to eat or drink anything.  Just to sit.  Which meant that we, even as people who wanted to pay, couldn't even get seats.  We were wet.  I was cold.  In other words, it was a great set up for a miserable start to our vacation and great way for me to get in an awful mood towards other people.  

No worries, we powered through. :)

The upside of the rain did exist!  

We got to wander in an almost deserted Brugges (at least, that's what it felt like) when it was raining, dry for the most part under our umbrella and good waterproof rain jackets.  

I bought a very cute pair of boots, since my other shoes weren't as waterproof as I hoped.  

We found other very cute cafes "off the beaten path" that were almost deserted, since the tourists didn't seem to want to venture that far in the rain.  

We were able to wander the grounds of an old Benadictine nunnery in the rain.  

While waiting to see if our bike tour would still be heading out, we met a charming British couple and chatted with them and then with our tour guide for the better part of an hour (in the downpour).  We later had dinner with that couple after we wandered into the same amazing authentic Belgian restaurant that evening.

The point is, we still had an amazing time in Brugges, despite the weather.  And, like our B&B host said, now we can say we experienced the real Brugges.

The view from the Belltower.  You pay an entrance fee to go up, but you have to wait to buy your ticket and then ascend as they only allow a few people at a time (I want to say 75?) in the tower.  When we heard this, I didn't understand.  Then we began climbing to the top.  It's a steep climb to the top, but I would have to say the climb is not the issue.  The staircase itself is winding and NARROW.  Going down was a thrill, I'll tell you that.  Goodness.

I just loved wandering the streets.

It stopped raining on our canal ride for about 5 minutes.  This was the only picture we took.  Plus, the commentary on the ride was pretty blah.  Not recommended to waste your money on.

One of the charming cafes we were able to duck into.  Many of these places in pictures look "fake" authentic, but in real life, they are pretty "shabby" authentic.

Cafe Rose Red.  So cute!

Begijnhof Nunnery.  All who come here are supposed to be silent, but the foreign language tourists don't/can't read the signs and so are definitely not silent.

All in all, we had a great time in Belgium.  It was the perfect place to start our trip and ease into the rest of the European continent, particularly with regards to language.  The train system is as easy to figure out as the German rail (my standard for the best train system-love Deutsche Bahn!), the people were friendly, they had frites, and their cities were ridiculously walkable.  While neither of us are sure that we would go back again, we are both very glad that we went!

Belgium

When we discussed our itinerary, we each had different places that we wanted to see.  We made a list of places we wanted to go and whittled down from there.  We still ended up with a little too ambitious itinerary, but I wouldn't change that.  (I would do it differently next time, though!).
We also had little meetings, one of which we discussed our travel goals.  When we went to London, we went where Rick Steves told us to go and did the activities he recommended.  At the end of that trip, we realized that what he likes to do is not necessarily what we like to do.  We also realized that there is not going to be a resource out there that is going to fit our interests and goals - so we set our own goals and searched out activities to fit that. Perhaps calling these goals isn't perfectly appropriate; maybe this is our travel philosophy.  :)

Rural > City
Physical activities & Food > Museum & Arts
Avoiding overly touristy areas as much as possible

We weren't strict with these guidelines and absolutely ended up in our fair share of touristy cities.  But, it was our first time and we plan to work on perfecting this.

First Country: Belgium

After a long flight, a harrowing 1.5 hours in Heathrow and almost missing our flight, we arrived in Brussels.  Our first European city is one of the most diverse in culture.  Belgium itself is split in language - 1/2 recognizes French as its primary language, 1/2 recognizes Dutch but all speak English as their common language.  In Brussels, they speak French and English.  We thought that Belgium would be a good place to start our trip, given that the language barrier would hopefully be not as great as in other countries.

We were in Brussels for less than 24 hours and spent most of that time wandering the city, exploring, visiting a local landmark and partaking in the local cuisine:

Mmm, samurai sauce...

Belgians are very proud of their frites.  So much so, that it is a faux pas to call them "French fries".  After all, you are not eating them in France, are you?  Seriously, these are as good as they look.  And, as my mother's daughter, I do have a fondness for fries.  And frites are the best version that I could have.  They are double fried so that they are both crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.  Served in either a paper cone as shown above or in a square container with a teeny tiny fork so you don't get your hands greasy, it is not just the tourists eating these.  This was a perfect dinner to our incredibly long day that started the morning before with me working a half day on Saturday and then seemed to never end.

We then walked over to the Grand Place, a city square founded centuries before.  All of the various guilds (kind of like trademan unions) are represented.  This square is unique because all the buildings, which are so fabulous, are of the same architecture, rare in Europe.  This is because after a great fire, all of the guilds became very competitive to finish first.  The result was a very beautiful square with amazing architecture and feel:

There was a local festival going on while we were there, so the Place was packed!

I just couldn't get over being here.  After a long flight and being a little tired, it felt incredibly surreal.

After going back to our hotel, which was just steps away from the Grand Place, we crashed and got one of the best nights sleep!  We woke up early the next morning and set out to explore a little more before we headed to Brugges.  We happened on the statue of this little man:

 Mannekin Pis

A close-up of the truly little statue

This is one of Brussel's biggest tourist attractions.  It's supposed to be an homage to a little boy who put out a fire that could have destroyed the city by peeing on it.  And yes, the statue's name is actually Mannekin Pis.  Awesome, I know.

I had read so much about it that I was incredibly surprised when we found him because it felt like we just stumbled on him.  We walked past a few shops with apparently life-sized technicolored chocolate versions but I thought there would be a bigger lead-up.  Possibly it's because we were there so "early" in the morning (like 9am) but there weren't hoards of people.  As with many of the cultural landmarks that we just "had to see" on our trips, the buildup led to a disappointment rather than a highlight.

One of the ideas that I went into this trip with was to have as few expectations as possible in order to let each site amaze me, rather than have expectations be dashed and miss the amazing aspects due to my disappointment.  I didn't do this perfectly (more on this later), but it did help me to appreciate the little things and just enjoy the moment.

More on our trip later!

Europe 2013

During the stressful parts of PA school, I would dream about "real life" when I was done.  Steve and I talked and dreamed of where we wanted to go, what we wanted to see, adventures we wanted to have.  We knew that if we wanted to travel, it would have to be a priority.  We knew that one of the things we wanted to do when I was done with school was travel.  We are so lucky to live in a "vacation" state, so oftentimes our weekend consists of activities that people have to take time off of work and spend money to go and do - but we wanted to get out of our comfort zones and go where we had never been before.

After lots of long conversations and research on my part, we set our itinerary and bought our plane tickets.  I had read several (ok, more than that!) travel blogs that discussed budgeting for travel.  The first step is to always buy your plane tickets, since then you are committed.  Our tickets had us arriving in one country and leaving from another, which is a very easy way to really leave your itinerary in between open.  

Now, some people travel by the seat of their pants through Europe.  They have their Eurail pass and find places to stay when they get there.

Well, those people are not me.  I would be so stressed doing that, worried we wouldn't have somewhere to stay or it would be too expensive.  The other thing is that the Eurail pass isn't as cheap as it once was - and I found much cheaper tickets just by shopping 90 days in advance.  Granted, our train travel was really set and we couldn't miss any trains, but this ended up not being a problem at all.  Additionally, if we had just waited to find somewhere to stay in Paris when we got there, we would have been in major trouble.  Even just looking 2 months out, I would hesitate too long on booking a place by ~5 minutes and the place would be fully booked.  That place is constantly busy with tourists, I guess.

We are lucky to not be bound by the schoolyear right now for travel.  On the contrary, my work often slows down a little bit around September/October when school starts again.  So taking time off to travel in September when everyone else is heading back to work and school at the end of summer was just perfect - with a few exceptions that I'll discuss later.

I may or may not go through city by city, but I plan on discussing the highlights of our trip and where we definitely want to go back.  Spoiler alert, Paris is not on that list.  :)

Our itinerary for 14 days in Europe:

Brussels, Belgium

Bruges, Belgium

Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany

Munich, Germany

Salzburg, Austria/ day trip to Berchtesgaden, Germany

Alsace region, France

Paris, France.

I will be back with more!

Day 3

The weather our 3rd day in Kauai consisted of (you guessed it) rain, clouds, and rain...but we didn't let it stop us!!  We had a number of hikes that we wanted to accomplish while we were in Kauai...but most of those didn't happen unfortunately because of the weather.  However!  We accomplished (sort of) the Sleeping Giant:

Nounou Mountain

The beginning is between hedges of pretty awesome homes.

I loved how different the forest was from what we are used to!

Um, that's not rain...it was humid!

So we got to what we thought was the top, since there was nowhere to go up anymore.  Turns out, we didn't quite finish the hike and had slightly more to go up.  Next time!

After hiking, we headed out for our surfing lessons.  We went with this small set-up that doesn't seem very official, but it was super cheap.  The waves were not super intense, but the water was high and for a shorty like me, a little too high.  It took me like 3x as long to get back out to the instructor as the 3 guys doing it...not fair!  We both caught a few waves.  When we left, I never wanted to surf again, since I felt like I sucked in more salt water than air...but Steve had a blast and we decided to give it another go later on in the week...we had more success!

The beach where we surfed...please note, those waves look smaller than they are... at least the water level is deeper. :)

Exhausted

It then began raining.  We hadn't eaten lunch since our early morning breakfast and it was late afternoon after our lesson, so we ate at a Mexican restaurant that we'd heard was the best on the island.  It was good...the most fun was the people watching, but isn't that usually how it goes?  We then headed back south and checked out another beach, where we saw our first (but not last!) sea turtle:

Kauai Day Two: Stand Up Paddleboarding, Waimea Canyon, and Glass beach

Our second day in Kauai, we both woke up about 5:30am...which is 930am MST, so actually got a bit of a sleep-in.  But!  We didn't miss the sunrise-is there any better way to sleep in but still take advantage of the day?  Love that kind of time difference!  We headed down to Shipwreck beach for an absolutely beautiful sunrise:

My favorite thing was seeing the water turn the color of the sky-amazing!

We were by far not the only people with the idea of seeing the sunrise.

After sunrise, we headed over to Lappert's, an ice cream parlor and cafe to get a fresh brewed cup of organic Kona coffee:

Delicious!

One of the things we learned on this trip is that in order to earn the label of Kona coffee, a blend only has to contain 10% Kona beans.  100% Kona coffee is extremely pricey...for instance, that 16 oz cup of 100% Kona coffee in Steve's hand was $5.  For just coffee, no latte, nothing fancy.  Well, just fancy coffee.  It was very good and we thoroughly enjoyed it, but we didn't not buy any bags of Kona coffee, lol.

Our first full day in Kauai was supposed to start with an early morning sea kayak adventure.  However, there was a front blowing in and the currents/waves/ocean was unfriendly and so it was canceled.  While we were totally bummed, we rolled with the punches and instead headed up to Kalapaki bay to do this:

Nooo, this isn't me.  The few pictures we took are still on a disposable camera.

This was a blast - and so easy to do!  We were originally going to take lessons, but they were booked for the time we wanted.  We figured it didn't look so hard and after a brief run down on how to start, we headed out on this bay:

We only did an hour and this day only tried to catch a couple waves, but loved enjoying the scenery and watching all the surfers and more experienced paddleboarders catching the waves you can see breaking on the right of the picture.

We then headed down to Waimea Canyon to check it out.  We'd heard some awesome things about this place and while we had it planned a little later in our trip, thought we'd work in some hiking and just do it twice.  As nature had it, turns out the day we went was the best day to go before it started raining buckets.

Waimea Canyon-It's a long way down from here...

While it looks like you'll head over a cliff if you go forward, it's actually just part of the hike...very steep!  My chacos were super appreciated.

Another view of the canyon

After this hike, we headed down, picked up some Thai iced tea (yum!) at a little joint in Waimea, and headed to this place:

Glass beach

This is located in a industrial part of Port Allen.  Most of the beach is composed of sea glass.  We read that a long time ago, there were actually large pieces of sea glass, but because you are permitted to take home a bucketfull a day, it now is just full of small pieces:

Still interesting and beautiful!

We then headed to one more beach, Brennecke's beach, but it was getting pretty cloudy and so we just hung out for a little bit and watched the boogie boarders...no surfers in these waters.  Then we had an easygoing dinner at Tortilla Republic, enjoying the beautiful atmosphere and had an early bedtime (830 was our average...lol!)

Kauai Day One

What a whirlwind of a relaxing week!  I figured I'd take it day by day, since it feels like we fit so much in every day, even with poor weather that happened.  If it's one thing we've learned as adults, it's that rain happens and you can either let it ruin your plans or just suck it up and proceed (if safe).

The week that we left was pretty busy at work.  Busy where I'd come home and almost immediately fall into bed I was so exhausted.  Luckily, I'd begun packing the week before, so I didn't end up forgetting too much.  I did forget to print this "master" itinerary that I'd cooked up that had phone numbers, flight numbers, activities, itinerary by day, restaurants to try...and we didn't realize it until we were almost in Grand Junction the night before we left.  But...we sucked it up, saved the gas back home and just went with it.  As it turns out, I had most of it memorized anyways and any phone numbers we needed were accessible in my email, so wasn't so big a deal.  We dropped the dogs off at the boarders night before and headed to Grand Junction to spend the night, since our flight was fairly early.  Lucky we did, since it was snowing!  That's CO for ya...60 degrees one day, snow, then 60 degrees again.  Fortunately, our flight wasn't delayed at all and we set off on time for our grand Hawaiian adventure, from Grand Junction to a VERY short layover in Phoenix (love those short layovers that you don't miss the connecting flight!) and then straight to Lihue, the biggest city on Kauai.

People had been telling me that stepping off the plane in Hawaii was their best memory and that it was one to remember.  Well, for me it felt like stepping into OK in July, so I wasn't impressed, just really hot and sticky, since I was still wearing cold weather gear.  I did think it was pretty cool that most of the airport is outdoors, taking advantage of the tradewinds that the Hawaiians seem to love so much.  We collected our rental car and headed off to Poipu, where we were staying the first few nights.

We rented a suite in a house that was located right off beach next to the Hyatt from a website called airbnb.com.  We used this when we went to England and felt like giving it another shot, since it seemed a lot more affordable than the hotels I was seeing to stay in.  The suite in Koloa was great; private entrance, refrigerator, coffee maker (essential!), and with easy access to this place:

Shipwreck Beach

Our flight arrived around 2 in the afternoon and after doing the necessary run to Costco, etc, and checking in at the suite, we headed straight to the beach.  Little did we know, it would be one of the few sunny days we had in Kauai! Luckily, we soaked it up (with sunscreen, of course).  We were both sort of intimidated of the waves after watching the warning videos at the airport that essentially tell you to never get in the water, so we didn't get in these waves.  Instead, we just did this:

Please note, we were both this pale...and yet, we were asked a couple times if we were from the area.  Like somebody told us, the migratory two legged white tailed buck quickly becomes unrecognizable when they shed their winter coats and become the two legged red tail buck...  :)

Then we headed out for tapas at Josselin's, which was good but we had better food other places on the island.  However, it was still fun and beautiful.  We crashed early every night we were in HI since the 4 hour time difference and definitely got some great rest that night...after all, day 2 and Waimea Canyon was next!

Let the traveling begin!

It was always our goal when we were done with school and settling into our careers to do some traveling.  Living in a vacation state is such a luxury since we get to do so many things on our average weekend that others have to take time off, travel, hotels, etc.  It also means that when we go on vacation, I want to go somewhere big.  Well, that's me, anyway.  Go big or just don't do it.  We have several trips lined up on the horizon-most tentative, but one approaching fast!  In less than 6 days, we will be setting off for a week in Kauai!

Neither Steve nor I have ever been and we are so excited to be setting off to the Garden Island for our first Hawaii experience.  I absolutely love my job, we love Montrose, and Steve is extremely satisfied to be working from home...but we need a vacation stat!  I have been planning for months, lining up activities, finding where we will be staying, and researching restaurants (my fave!)  I plan to blog about everything we do, but will do so when we get back, since I won't be bringing my computer.  Here's a brief run-down of our itinerary (so I remember what to blog about!)

First 4 days, will be staying on the southside, Poipu, in a little condo 400ft from the beach.  On the docket:

-Sea kayaking

-Surfing lessons

-Crossfit Kauai

-Kauai Coffee Company

-Sleeping Giant Hike

-Snorkeling

-Waimea Canyon Hikes

-Barking Sands Beach?

-Beaches!

Then we will be making our way up towards the northside, the rainier side and staying on an organic farm (because THAT'S got to be an experience to remember, right??)

-Kalalau Trail to the beach

-Napali coast boat tour

-Hiking

-Paddleboarding

-Beaches and snorkeling!

We plan on taking LOADS of pictures and are so pumped for this trip!