Monday, June 29, 2009

England: Part 2

Other tidbits about England: The weather was a beautiful breezy 70 degrees the whole time. Could not have been better! Also, it was a lot of fun spending time alone with my Mom. She's a lot of fun to travel with. Travel buddies are the best when they love all the same things you do. It will be a trip that we will talk about for years to come.

Day 4:

- Leeds Castle



- Bodiam Castle



- Bateman's (Rudyard Kipling's home)

(Image from google images)

- The Downs (Southern coast)


Day 5:

- Oxford

- Blenheim Palace

- A long drive to Derbyshire- Our Bed and Breakfast was called Heathy Lea, right on the Chatsworth Estate!


Day 6:

- Hardwick House
(Image from google images)

- Kedleston
(Image from google images)

- Walk in Chatsworth park



(Could it be more picturesque? I'm glad I had my camera for the walk)

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Fabulous awesome England trip

Boy have I lost my gusto for blogging. But I can't bring myself to delete it either, cause I'm sure I'll come up with something really awesome to blog about the moment I do.

I do have one excuse however- I've been in England with my mama for a week and a half. Boy that was an amazing trip. But boy I get really tired when I'm pregnant and walking most of the day. It was a little discouraging to not have the energy to immerse myself as fully into exploring like I wanted to. I'm at the beginning of my 7th month of pregnancy and my baby is taking up all my energy. But I was able to enjoy everything a lot still, and tried my best not to think of Ross and Ethan while I was gone... Yeah right like that was possible! Every little baby boy I saw was Ethan. Anyway. It was an awesome trip.

So because I didn't really have a lot of energy to spare, I didn't get a whole bunch of pictures (creative or otherwise) like I wanted. I brought my big camera. Which is so heavy! And my little baby point-and shoot doesn't really allow you to do much. So that was another small dilemma.

Day 1:

- Rented car at Heathrow airport and drove West towards Bath (scariest thing ever, but my mom only grazed the curb like 5 times. Those roads are so stinkin' narrow!)

- Wells




- Bath


- City centre
- Royal Crescent
- Royal Circus

Day 2:

- Roman Baths



- Longleat House

- Stourhead


- Bradford-on-Avon

Day 3:

- Stonehenge

- Petworth

- Hever Castle


To be continued... hopefully I'll get some of my mom's pictures to supplement here too. Sigh. Now it's back to reality with 100 degree weather and 1,000,000 percent humidity.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Houston!

Well so we returned from our trip to Houston to see Phil and Kathleen over a month ago... and here're some pictures from the trip!

Ethan did surprisingly well in the car for 12 hours. We made multiple stops, and I think we had braced ourselves for the worst. So when he only screamed twice for extended periods (like 10 minutes) of time it felt like we were doing great! We stopped in Oklahoma City and Dallas on the way down and on the way back.


It POURED rain all the way from Wichita to Oklahoma City. But we had made plans to see the Myriad Botanical Gardens in Oklahoma City, so we stopped there anyway. We couldn't see any of the gardens outdoors but luckily they had an indoor arboretum that was pretty dang cool too. The rain was dripping through the ceiling and off of the plants anyway so we got pretty soaked after all. (I used the point-and-shoot almost the whole trip. I LOVE the macro feature on that camera!)






Of course I demanded that we go to IKEA while we were there. It was only a few minutes away from where they live! Lucky. And we went to the park, and we went to Galveston, and we went to Kemah boardwalk... and some other things too. But this is getting too long.


Ethan slept the whole ride. He was exhausted.

I couldn't help paddle cause I was wearing a skirt.
Good thinking Lauren! Got outta that one.

And Ethan knew just what to do at the beach.

He loved the fountains at Kemah boardwalk.

Stolen from Kathleen's camera:

And it was a looooong pretty ride home.


Thanks Phil and Kathleen! It was lots of fun. We'll come visit you at the next cool place you live too!

Oh and another thing that was super cool was that we got to see my grandparents who were traveling down from Manhattan (we missed their visit there) to Austin! We just both happened to be in Oklahoma City at the same time, so they treated us to dinner. It worked out so nicely.