A Honeymoon and Compromise

About a month after the wedding, Clay and I packed up our bags, headed to Atlanta and hoped on a flight to Barcelona for our honeymoon. We took a 7 night Mediterranean cruise to various spots in Italy, France, and Spain. You all know that I LOVE to travel but Clay doesn’t quite share that same passion. Most of the time he’s happy to get some time home alone while I go exploring, but this trip gave us the opportunity to see a little bit of the world together and it was fantastic. 

A few nights before we left we went to dinner with my parents. We were talking about the differences in our travel and vacation preferences and my parents told us something that we really liked. My dad said that he likes to take trips and my mom likes to vacation and I think that Clay and I are the same way. When I travel I like to take trips. I enjoy going to new and exciting places and packing my schedule so that I don’t miss anything the city has to offer. When Clay travels, he likes to vacation. He wants to go somewhere calm and relaxing. He wants to lie under an umbrella all day and have someone else take care of all of his food, drink, and activities. 

Cruising is a great way to ease a novice traveler into a European vacation. You get to see the highlights of a lot of cool places but then return to luxury amenities, all you can eat food, and English speakers when the day is done. If you have a reluctant traveler, I highly recommend going to cruise route! It was the perfect compromise for us. Who doesn’t love a cruise? 

Anyway, here are some pictures from the trip. We had a blast. I’m already planning our next vacation/trip! 

Days 1 and 2: Barcelona and the boat

Barcelona. We only spent a few hours in this amazing city but we'll definitely be back.

Our boat had some pretty "cool" offerings, one of which was the Ice Bar!

Relaxing on our balcony. Clay's happy vacation time :)

 Day 3: Sorento and Pompeii 

 This day was our favorite! We had an incredible guide and got to do some pretty neat things.

I mean, just look at this view. I could live here.

Plaster on the walls of a home in Pompeii. It blows my mind that this has been preserved for thousands of years. Amazing! 

After Pompeii, we went to a little farm in the hills. I loved these cows!

Maria taught us how to make mozzarella from the milk of the cows pictured above. Talk about fresh and delicious!

I seriously wanted to move here and work on this little farm. It was perfect.

 Day 4: Rome

Rome was a crazy day for us. How are you suppose to do Rome in one day? I let Clay pick the excursion since he has never been before and he wanted to go to the Vatican and see the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican Museum was crazy crowded and while we did finally make it to the Chapel, everyone was pretty grouchy and tired by that time so we didn't get to fully enjoy it. We had a lovely guide though and actually ran into my friend Susanna, who is also a Vatican Museum guide. Small world! 

Umbrella pines. My favorite.

We had a quick stop at the Coliseum in Rome

Outside of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome

 Day 5: Florence

We were so beat after our Roman adventure that we opted for a nice vineyard tour wine tasting in Tuscany instead of trying to cram all of Florence into a day. We spent the day in beautiful gardens drinking wine and eating cheese. I think we made the right choice.

 

Lovely gardens on the estate. Christmas card, anyone?

At one point, the estate belong to the family who makes Vespas!

Such a romantic little road

 Day 6: Marseille, France

Marseille was a lovely city by the sea with plenty of shops, restaurants, and great walking trails. We stopped in the cutest bakery with a very sweet owner and ate incredible eclairs. They were to die for!

Another Christmas card contender. Awesome view in from the Notre Dame de la Garde

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 Fun story, we almost died hiking up to the top of this hill. We aren't really outdoorsy people and it was much more challenging than we had anticipated but well worth the view! 

Day 7: Palma Majorca

Our last port of call was an island off the coast of Spain. I was not feeling very well this day so we just got off the boat and wandered around. We actually ended up in a really big mall, which Clay got a real kick out of. It was fun to send the day pretending like we were wealthy Spaniards. I didn't really take any worthy pictures this day. Sorry folks! 

So that was our fun, action-packed honeymoon. Every time i come back home from Europe I start itching to plan my next trip. I'm thinking a visit to Paris to see Sofy is in order soon!

That's it for now. Be sure to check out what I've got going on at Nerd Soup weekly. It's been fun writing for Clay's website and I'm sure you guys are happy I'm not boring you with TV posts.

The Joys of Homeownership

Clay and I have been in our house for a little over a year now and have loved living there. The house is the perfect size for us, we love our neighborhood, we have a big back yard and tons of beautiful day lilies, and we love how close we are to work/school. But there are definitely a few headaches that go along with owning your own place and for the past few weeks we’ve been suffering from a homeownership migraine!

Aren't they beautiful! These lilies make me happy!

 

Shortly after we moved in, we noticed that water pooled in the driveway after a hard rain. The standing water made it pretty hard for me to get in and out of my car when it was raining but we put up with it for almost a year because we didn’t really know what to do about it.

This summer we decided to tackle some of our yard issues and the flooding problem was our first project. We thought that the clay (the red sticky stuff, not my husband) wasn’t absorbing enough water so we decided to dig up the clay and put stones in the trench. The water would collect under the stones and then quickly evaporate after the rain. Sound simple enough, right? Wrong.

First of all, digging out a giant hole of Alabama red clay is no easy task! The clay is incredibly compact and sticky, which makes for tiresome digging. Once we got all of the clay out and the rocks in, we waiting a few days for a good, hard rain. Well, the rain came and then it didn’t stop for 2 weeks and we found out quickly that the rocks only exacerbated the problem. We spent the next 2 weeks pumping water out of the hole in our yard and brainstorming ideas for our flooding problem that didn’t involve an engineer, landscaper, and several thousand dollars. It wasn’t fun for anyone…

Muddy driveway after the rock solution. Gross.

 Finally, this weekend brought us sunny weather and a nice breeze so we dug out the rocks and planted a rain garden along our driveway. We mixed together 4 different types of super absorbent soil and planted water friendly bushes. We are still waiting for a big rain to tell us if we’ve succeeded or not, but for now it looks good and I don’t have red clay all over everything I own!  Keep your fingers crossed for us. If this doesn’t work, I think Clay might move out :) 

Our rain garden. Hopefully these puppies are thirsty!

 

I'm back!

Long time, no see! 

So….you may have noticed that I’ve been MIA for the past year. I’m pretty bummed about the fact that I didn’t blog at all because a lot of really cool stuff happened last year. Here’s a nice little recap for you (I was also pretty bad at taking pictures).

I started a PhD program

I got my first official office (legit).

I got engaged!

Said PhD program was super hard  :( 

 

I attended a lot of awesome showers for my super sweet friend who were getting married and having babies

 I attended a few of my own showers

I started taking Pure Barre classes

I finished the first year of school (praise the Lord! This stuff is hard!)

I got married!

 

I went to Europe!

I taught my first class (scary!)

I started blogging again (let’s hope this one sticks!)

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I’m back! I’ll flush all of these events out in more detail later on, but for now you can hop on over to my husband's (yippee!) new, awesome website and check out my weekly TV column (if you’re into that sort of thing).