Well I should have been arriving home in about 3 hours. But alas, we haven't even left yet. Somehow Lauren and I overslept a bit.. no that's an understatement. We slept until almost 5 p.m. I knew we were tired.. but wow. Every other day on the trip my little alarm has served just fine. But today we didn't even get up when housecleaning came in and turned the lights on and off. Lauren says she remembers thinking that is was odd but stayed in bed. I must say I'm a little embarrassed. With any luck we should be home tomorrow [View Full Entry]

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here we are in Rome! lauren and i are having a great time here in europe. i love all of it but especially switzerland (probably because it rained so much) i dont have much time but i wanted to let you know we are just fine and loving it here. we even found some houses on our house hunt in tuscany. more soon and much love mindy [View Full Entry]

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Today we got up and went into the town of Florence for a walking tour with a local guide. We saw some beautiful churches with facades made entirely out of marble (white, green, and red). Oddly enough the Santa Croce has a big Star of David on top because the man who designed the facade was Jewish. Our guide told us about all the fascinating people who once lived in Florence. How amazing would it have been to be able to live in that time? I can barely imagine. After the walking tour we saw a leather demonstration where they among [View Full Entry]

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It was another early morning as we had to leave at 7:45 to head to Florence or Firenze in Italian. It was still raining so we loaded up and left again in the pouring rain. On the bright side, as we were driving towards Italy all the waterfalls were overflowing and gushing down the mountains. It was beautiful. Switzerland was probably the prettiest country we visited. On the way we stopped in Pisa. Neither Lauren nor I remembered the church being there at all. I don't know why I thought the tower would have been there otherwise, but we were happy [View Full Entry]

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Today we had the opportunity to go up the Jungfrau Mountain. Ash had told us it would be one of the best experiences we would have on the trip, so of course Lauren and I paid up and went. Jungfrau means virgin and according to Ash it's surrounded by another mountain called the monk who rescued her from the ogre mountain. Anyways, we went up the mountain by train. Well it wasn't a train of sorts because it had to hook on to a cable and be pulled as we got closer to the top. As we were going up the [View Full Entry]

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This day was a crazy long travel day. We drove from Paris to Switzerland. The scenery was very beautiful. To fill up the time Ash had us go up to the mike (is that how you are supposed to spell that?) and talk about ourselves. We had to tell where we were from and why we chose the tour and all of that stuff. We also had to tell an embarrasing story, a joke, or a pick up line. There were some very funny ones. I learned that many Aussis go to Canada for some reason. I mean, I suppose it [View Full Entry]

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They fed us breakfast at the hotel (croissants, which aren't really French, and some meat and cheese. I think I ate about 3), and then we headed into the city of lights around 9:00. It took us an hour to get into the city because of the traffic. I don't think I could drive in Europe, there aren't really any lanes so everyone just drives where ever they feel like it. We were dropped off at the Eiffel Tower with instructions to return there at 7:00 pm. We didn't really know what we wanted to do in the city. The cues [View Full Entry]

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Tour Day One: We met at the Globetrotters Hostel in London. We had to ride the tube from our hotel over there so we got up pretty early to make it to our 6:00 am show time. We grabbed breakfast at a gas station because we didn't know when we would have the chance to eat again, but there weren't many options. You could definitely tell we were tourists because we were in shorts and light jackets and all the Brits had on nice warm clothes for the yucky day. We met our group and our tour guide Ashley, who is [View Full Entry]

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Well.. we made it to London! lauren and I are a little ashamed of our uncool nonaccents here but oh well. the flights were long, and unexciting, but after the guys we got to sit next to yesterday today flights were better. The men yesterday did not say anything to us and the one next to lauren didn't smell so good. but, today we were together and survived the less than pleasant airplane food. they brought us a breakfast of all fruit. not even the pancakes were safe. we did meet some interesting people however.. one man said his band was [View Full Entry]

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Here we go, off to the other side of the world (more or less). Packing wasn't as terrible as I thought it would be.. but I'm taking a pretty big suitcase (and an extra one for souveniers ha). I took a picture of it because I just wanted to see how they worked.. I know a packed bag isn't all that fun to look at. =D. It's a little scary thinking about having to do everything by ourselves, but I know we can manage because it's also really exciting. We're headed to Chicago tonight and then we have an early flight [View Full Entry]

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