marc and katie's life: Top Five Things We Loved Doing with Katey and Lou

Staring. So we travelled around to all these amazing sites and I think what we all loved most was that all four of us wanted to do the same thing: just sit and be there, soaking it all in. It made for really low-stress travel and magical moments! And we saw some truly amazing things.

Laughing. Pretty much everyday I laughed ‘til I cried, ‘til my stomach hurt, ‘til my cheeks burned!

Listening. Remember how we lost everything on our hard drive because we were idiots and didn’t back up our stuff? Yeah that was sad. Well Katey showed up with 30—that’s right, thirty—CDs for us, effectively rebuilding our music collection base! Saved our psyches and our ears! I’m listening to one of the CDs right now, in fact. Brilliant, Katey, absolutely smashing!

Eating. Lou and Katey were quick converts to full English Breakfast (including baked beans in the morning! mmmm), then there were all the other treats: chocolate digestives, ginger beer, squash drink, fizzy fangs, strawberry lances, jaffa cakes, fish ‘n chips, and the best Indian food I’ve had yet! Marc was called on to make us hot chocolate pretty much every day, too. (If you haven’t had a hot chocolate produced by the Maestro yet, you have quite an experience coming!) We also made sure to eat at the Eagle and Child in Oxford, where The Inklings (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein and associates) would sit and discuss their books! (okay, well we didn't exactly eat there: we were on a budget, so we bought drinks but snuck in our own food! shhhhh)

Traveling. Trains, cars, buses, boats, subways, mopeds, feet—we did it all! We rented a car for most of the days and it was hilariously tiny. In Utah people would laugh at this car if they saw it driving along, especially with four adults inside it! But we were good sports and it actually was really fun to be confined to such close quarters during our road trips. No CD player? No air conditioning? No leg room? No luggage space? All of that’s no problem when you’re playing the “compound word game” or singing madly along with an imaginary radio! The necessity to make our own fun made the hours in the car were a true delight (and we got some pretty sweet gas mileage).