The Woodlands Crew

Hiya!

I hope all of you are having a great new semester so far. I just started graduate school – I’m doing the advanced standing Masters of Social Work program at Florida State U part-time. It is such a huge honor to get into this program because it’s a small cohort and is one of the best SW programs in the country (way better than UCF) so I am already being challenged by the work load even though it is part time. I haven’t started my full time job yet so I’m still nannying and doing Pampered Chef in the mean time (I’ll tell you all about the job when it becomes official). We moved alllll of our stuff into Bran’s parent’s house who live pretty close from where we used to live while we were on vacation so that we saved all of our expenses for August while we were gone (no rent/cable/energy/water bills, etc.) and put that towards the trip!! Our old lease ended the day after we left for Europe and we wanted to leave that complex anyway so it was perfect! We’re staying here until Oct. 7^th when our new lease begins… we’re downsizing to a 1 bedroom flat downtown and we’re sooo excited about it because the location will be amazing (which is why it’s so dang expensive and we’re downsizing). We’ll both be so close to work, church, our friends, and all of the fun things to do in Orlando. A little farther from the Beach but we haven’t been doing that much lately anyway. We have two pools and two hot tubs– that’ll do J So that’s what we’re working on the next few weeks: lots of transition! Into a new home, new town (still part of Orlando), new jobs, new routine. Same amazing husband, though! And actually… please be praying that the stinking NBA lockout will end so that the hiring freeze will END and my sweet husband can move from 20-30 hours a week to full time. When this happens we’ll get season tickets to games, too, so we’re super excited about that J

I will now take you all through our trip to Europe…there are literally hundreds of pictures uploaded on facebook but here are some highlights. I’m also working on creating a new travel blog. It’s mostly just a scrapbook for us to remember exactly where we’ve been and what we did. In addition, I want it to be a help to my friends that go to these places so they can see what I loved and didn’t love about each city – I documented every restaurant, site, gelateria, etc. that we hit and my reviews that I think will be helpful for friends/family and for us in the future when we go back.

I’ve realized through this trip how strong my passion is for travel. I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to see so many places at such a young age and that I married someone who loves to travel too! We’ve decided from the beginning of our relationship that travel is a financial priority to us. We’d rather live on a tight budget day to day and save up for trips. We also don’t do gifts for each other but instead we do something together like go skydiving or go on a trip, etc. For our anniversary this year we’re planning on going to NYC for the weekend and staying with my close family friends in Jersey so Bran can see where I grew up and we can do all the fun stuff in the city as well. Next year we’re going to try to make it back to Europe in the fall and we’ll stay with some friends we met on our trip that live in Belgium. We really enjoyed meeting all of these other travelers when we were in Europe and learning how we all live differently.

8/9 London

8/10 Hitchin

8/11 Cambridge

8/12 London à Glasgow

8/14 Glasgow à Edinburgh

8/15 St. Andrews

8/17 Edinburgh à Rome