Category: Uncategorized

Hopped Up on History, Architecture, and Codeine

Nancy and Jon in Toledo

Current Location: Cordoba, Spain

Dear patient reader,

I´m sorry that I have been unable to write until now.  We arrived safe and sound in Spain after a pretty painless red eye flight from Detroit.  We spent a couple days in Madrid attempting to adjust to the time change.  Somehow I was able to recall enough of my college Spanish to give our cab driver directions to our hostal. (And no Joe, I did not ask him if his ¨pantalones estan en fuego¨- which seemed to be the only sentence we took from class…).  Madrid was fun, but it was much like big cities everywhere, just with a different voice. 

Onward from Madrid we headed to Toledo which suffers unfairly from it´s Midwestern U.S. counterpart.  It is nothing like the pit in Ohio of the same name. (Apologies to anyone reading this who is from Toledo, Ohio… ).  We took the train in and decided to walk into the city center, uphill, with our ¨fat midgets¨ (our backpacks) on our backs.  (The attached picture was taking on our approach).  The walk was beautiful, but the end result was that we were painfully sore.  Fortunately for us we happened to have the foresight to pack some Tylenol 3´s to take the edge off.  We may be numbed enough to work our joints down into oblivion, but at least we´ll have a Hell of a trip in the meantime!

Yesterday we headed to Cordoba.  Today we went to an ancient Muslim city just outside of Cordoba. It was amazing! It is so humbling to visit these sites and think that a thousand years ago people probably much like us walked these same paths.

That´s all for now.  Hopefully by the end of this trip we´ll both be fluent in Spanish! Right now we´d settle for being able to know what we´re ordering off of a menu…

Next Stop: Granada, Spain

Hello.

[Current Location: Grand Blanc, Michigan]                                                                               So, today marks the first entry in our travel blog.  We are less than 48 hours away from leaving for our “Mega-Moon”.  The reality of the venture has finally started to sink in, but currently I am feeling a bit morose watching the Spartans crash and burn in the Sweet 16.                                                                                                                                 Besides that though, we are about to leave on a two month long odyssey through Europe and I am feeling all kinds of excited!  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the reference- Jon and I took a “mini-moon” following the wedding to unwind for a few days in Mexico.  Because he was still in school he couldn’t really take that much time off.  Now that he has (finally) graduated and has a few months off before starting his job at the University of Maryland (oh yeah- we’re moving to the Baltimore/D.C. area in June), we are using this time to take the kind of honeymoon that suits our leisure loving personalities.  Hence the “Mega-Moon” was born.                                                                                                                     I’m hoping to update this blog as often as possible, and hopefully post some pictures now and then.  Check back whenever you’ve reached the end of the Internet (i.e. the tournament is over, Slate hasn’t updated, or Perez is snoozing on the job), and/or just feel like seeing what we’ve been up to.         Love you!!  Goodbye!                                                                              [Next stop: Madrid, Spain]