months and months ago i requested a week off in december. i am a planner, and i knew november was going to be bonkers and i was going to need some time off, so i went ahead and marked it on the calendar. i had no idea where i wanted to go or what i wanted to do, but i at least had the dates at the ready.

as we wound our way out of summer and geared up for the fall, that week continued staring me in the face. did i want to go on a road trip somewhere close? did i want to stay home and get some things done around the house? did i want to go on a grand adventure? i had so many thoughts swirling around in my head and was talking about it incessantly while i tried to figure out what i wanted to do.

and then it hit me: i wanted to go to london. i love the city so much, but also i missed my friends who live there. ellie and ben. rob. dorothy and chirag. alex. jagan, maeve, maia, and iona. jon and flick. johanna and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. i saw ellie and ben most recently when we went to portugal last year, but for the others it had been a minimum of 3.5 years, and in the case of jon and flick 7.5, so it was time to return.

i messaged the usual suspects and asked if they would be around during the time i had off. all said yes! dorothy even mentioned bern would be in london at the time to celebrate her birthday. it seemed obvious that this was the journey i needed to make all along.

and then i mentioned it to jeremy, and that’s where things really got fun. the more i talked about my trip, the more excited he got. he was going to be in miami the weekend before and happened to notice a cheap flight from there to london, so he announced he would be joining me on my trip. i said let’s do it. then he discovered the magic of low-cost european carriers and found cheap tickets to barcelona. once again, i said let’s do it.

and now it’s been done. we’ve recently returned from a week spent in london and barcelona, and when i say it was fantastic that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. i will be writing longer posts about our time in each place, but the basics are this: we ate a lot, drank a little, navigated public transit systems, learned some spanish, took lots of photos, and laughed until our faces hurt. outside of a few flight snags, it was a fabulous week and was exactly what i needed.

xx