Europe
By Chris Hines
Monday, June 27, 2005
We spent the first week of our trip in and around London. We both thoroughly enjoyed our stay in this amazing city. It seemed like there were historic buildings around every corner. First we have the obligatory visit to Buckingham Palace, which was only a few blocks from our hotel.
We had mostly good weather during our trip with the exception of the first couple of days. Since it was raining outside we decided to head to the British Museum and spend the first day indoors. The British Museum is filled with incredibly old artifacts, such as this Egyptian statue.
The Tower of London is one of the city's most popular attractions. We weren't disappointed. One has to be impressed by a building built over 900 years ago.
Of course the Tower of London is a baby compared to this next monument. Stonehenge is impressively old by comparison to nearly everything else we saw on our trip.
At first the next photo looks like a fancy private swimming pool. In reality it is the man pool of the hot spring powered Roman bath in the town of Bath (no kidding, the town is named after what you see in the photo).
The castle in the lake below is Leeds Castle, also known as the "Ladies Castle" because it was owned by several women during its history. This castle was beautiful both inside and out.
Below you see the impressive interior of Canterbury Cathedral. The picture speaks for itself.
Here we see the newlyweds posing in front of Tower Bridge. Londoners claim it's the most photographed bridge in the world. We did our part to help it hold onto the title.
Yes, we took a lot of pictures on our trip. Since we both have digital cameras we just snap as many pictures as we can and hope that some of them turn out. You might be shocked to learn that in the 12 days we were in Europe we took over 3,300 pictures between the two of us. The result, we have several hundred beautiful pictures.
(Hey, there's that bridge again.)
Big Ben practically begs you to take his picture. There is no more universally recognized symbol of London than Big Ben.
The carnival ride in the background is the London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel over 400 feet tall. The next picture in the series shows a single one of its pods.
Each pod can hold around 20 or 30 people. It takes half an hour for the Eye to go around once, and the view is spectacular!
Witness Westminster Abbey. Every king and queen of England since 1066 was coronated in this building. There are probably more ultra famous people buried in this building than anywhere else on earth. Our tour guide said that over 3,000 people are buried inside. We're talking about kings, queens, scientists (Sir Isaac Newton), writers and poets (Chaucer, Tennyson). You literally cannot walk without stepping on a world famous person's grave.
After a week in England we boarded the Eurostar train and zipped under the English Channel and through the French countryside to Paris for the final five days of our trip. We got pretty lucky our first night in the French capital. Chris's sister visited Paris last summer and recommended seeing the Eiffel tower at night. We took her advice. The tower puts on a spectacular light show after dark, but we hadn't counted on seeing a beautiful full moon rise between its legs.
We took several side trips out of the cities. Our favorite of those trips was to see the chateaus of the Loire Valley about two hours drive south of Paris. Chambord was the first stop on the trip.
The next stop was Chenonceau. This chateau actually forms a bridge over the river.
The third chateau, Amboise, had a lot of cool looking gargoyles, but its main claim to fame is that Leonardo DaVinci is buried in the chapel.
We visited the immensely opulent palace of Versailles on our last day in France. Every wall of every room in the palace was covered with spectacular paintings. Outdoors the palace is surrounded by acres of incredible formal gardens.
We hope you enjoyed this brief photo journal of our honeymoon. Every day of the trip was something new. It was everything we hoped for, and more.
