November Break 2013 - London

I can barely believe the November break has already come and gone. For those of you that followed this blog since the beginning, you know the November break has always brought bad luck for us, well mostly bad health luck for Kev. You can refresh your memory here and here. Good news on the November curse, no health problems during the trip! The trip was, however, dampened with a decent amount of rain, but that is expected in London! I was lucky to see a familiar face and a great friend from University because she and her husband had recently moved there for jobs.

In three full days touring London, I feel as if we just scratched the surface of the city. It is an absolutely massive city with so much to do. We probably wouldn't have seen nearly as much either, if we didn't have Megan and John to tour us about here and there.

In our short vacation to London, we did the following:

• Double-Decker Bus Tour
• Saw the main sights: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, London Bridge, Tower Bridge, Picadilly Circus, etc.
• Saw the World's Longest Running Show: Agathe Christie's the Mousetrap. The play is a murder mystery on it's 60th Anniversary and I won't dare break the oath I took at the end by telling you "whodunit." The theatre (to us) was the epitome of an old theatre experience, uneven floors, steep staircases, uncomfortable seats, and full of charm! We loved it. Photos in the theatre were prohibited, but you can see a virtual tour of it here.
• Saw John's office for his new job
• Ate lots of pub food and pot pies. Whoever says English food is bland doesn't know what they're talking about. The English breakfast is killer, the pub burgers are way better than anything I've had in Germany, and the pot pie options are endless. Kev's favorite was the basic chicken pot pie and I enjoyed the mixed fish pie. Everything is served with mashed potatoes and mushy peas, of course!
• Kev and I decided we definitely aren't museum people after we strolled through the massive Victoria and Albert Museum. Beautiful though.
• Tasted a bunch of different beers on a mini-pub crawl with Meg and John. I swear there is a pub on every corner and at least two in between. Very few dance clubs, overload of pubs, also known as my heaven.
• Saw Notting Hill and the famous Portobello Market.
• Went to Regent Street for the famous "switching-on" of the Christmas Lights. Decided to avoid the crowds on the street and headed for a pub instead. The Christmas build-up is about 2 months long as the stores reap a massive percentage of their annual profits during this time. Makes sense when you don't have Thanksgiving to celebrate, I suppose!
• Mistakenly thought we saw Barbara Streisand at one of the pubs downtown. We sent the usually-willing John for a picture with her before we found out we were wrong. 
• Saw the London Eye and Tower Bridge at night, which was gorgeous all lit up.

That's about our trip in a nut-shell! I'll let the photos do the rest of the explaining.

Big Ben

Big Ben/London Eye

Westminster Abbey

Remembrance Weekend of both World Wars

One of the Oldest Churches in London

Pot Pies from the Pieminister Restaurant 

The famous Harrod's Department Store

Tower Bridge view standing on the London Bridge

Rest houses for the cab drivers

before the Remembrance Weekend parade

Notting Hill

Notting Hill

Old Cameras at the Portobello Market

Old boxing gloves at the Portobello Market

Meg sifting through the Portobello Market

Notting Hill

London Eye

Kev and I in front of Big Ben

Meg and I in front of Tower Bridge

Too many Beers led to a Berlin trip Bust!

I wish I could tell you lots of new interesting things about Berlin and it's history but in all honesty, it was a bit of a bust in the tourist aspect for us last weekend. After the boys game, I think we were all a bit too excited to go out together in a new city... which led to a bit too much alcohol consumption and a pretty hungover Monday for everyone. We got really eager when we found an American restaurant/bar showing some playoff football and saw those Long Island Ice Teas on the drink menu. The shots of the tequila later in the night wasn't helping anyone either! We still managed to get out the next morning (and I say morning lightly) to jump on a tour bus and see the main sights of the city. I'll let the photos we have do the rest of the explaining since I can't say my headache allowed me to listen much to the information on the bus.

Part of the Berlin wall to the right

The game the night before in Berlin was pretty wild! Berlin's arena was sold out and their fan's were pretty loud as they beat us 3-0. I took some video so you guys could get an idea of how loud it was! One is just during play and the other is after a Berlin goal.

We got a bit of big news while on the bus that also led to my distraction from the city. Kev and I are a proud uncle and aunt of a new baby boy. Cole Harry Schmidt came into the world around 6:30 a.m. on Monday. This is the first nephew for either one of us so it was pretty exciting stuff! Altough it makes us sad to miss big events like these, we appreciate how great everyone was with sending pictures of this beautiful little guy through e-mail and text messages!

Can't wait to meet you, Cole!

Since Monday, Kev has left for another weekend road trip. He left Thursday so Shannon had some wine with me yesterday to cheers to Kevin's and my 4-year anniversary. Never thought that saying yes to that date 4 years ago would lead to living in a new country with the guy I continue to fall more and more in love with. Couldn't be happier! We were hoping for a win to cheers to as well last night, but they lost a pretty tough one yesterday to Dusseldorf, 4-0. The team seems to be in a bit of a slump right now so hopefully that changes soon! Maybe Shannon and I can bring them some luck tomorrow when we travel to Ingolstadt to watch their game. It's about a 7 hour drive for us, but it works out perfectly because it is right on the way to Kitzbühel, Austria, where we will be spending the next week! It is February break for the boys and we are excited to have a fun week in the snow! Han's grandparents live there, so we will get to see and spend some time with them as well! They have been so welcoming and, with Bea and Oliver, have been such a help planning this trip. Time to go finish packing! Tschüss!

My luck with rookie sport experiences

A couple summers ago I lived in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina and was able to play my first ever round of golf on beautiful courses at the Sea Pines Resort. The view looked like this:

Kev got to play here too!

Well, in a couple weeks, we are taking a vacation to Austria, where I will ski for the second time ever. In Kitzbühel. Which is only one of Austria's most well known winter sport resort towns, home to the annual world cup ski races. With views and skiing that look a little something like this:

The ski resort at night

According to Wikipedia, we will have, "56 cableway and lift facilities and 168 kilometres of slopes available as well as 40 kilometres of groomed cross-country skiing tracks."  Needless to say, I am an extremely lucky girl to be able to have my first golf and skiing experiences at such amazing locations! Hope everyone is having a great weekend. Tschüss!

Random Wednesday!

There isn't much to update on as we have been just getting the last bits organized for our trip to PARIS tomorrow! EEEEEEKKKK!! We are so excited! We had dinner at the Scherenbergs on Monday and they hooked us up with a map and told us about all the must see places. We plan to rent bikes while we are there to get around the city easier! So seeing as we've been Paris, Paris, Paris all week, there isn't much else to talk about. So this is about to be one very random filled post!

*Hans has become pretty obsessed with Kevin lately. If asking me almost daily where he is and what he's doing isn't enough, our Play-doh time the other day was taken over by his love for Kevin. It started out simply wanting to make an "eishockey schneemann."

However, it soon turned into wanting to make a hockey player, and then a Freezer, and then just "I want to make Kevin!" So here it is, ladies and gents... Kevin in play-doh! Forget the fact that Kev has red hair and green limbs, we only had so many Play-doh colors to work with.

*We went and saw Toby Keith play on the Reeperbahn last night. He put on a good show but we were slightly disappointed that he only played a little over an hour and didn't come back for an encore. Good thing we were lucky enough to get free tickets because if we had paid 50 Euros like the rest of the crowd, we would have been whistling in anger with the rest of the Germans in the building! There were definitely some other Americans at the concert because I saw some people waving American flags!

*Before the concert, Kevin had to attend an autograph signing session downtown in the big indoor shopping complex called the Europa Passage. Kevin said that there were a good number of people there for autographs and the promotion should help for the next game also because they were selling tickets for only 10 Euro. The Freezers are still in 2nd place heading into the break this weekend.

*We found our beer and liquor store in this city! There is basically a warehouse nearby with a ton of different beers and a lot of liquors we don't find at other places. Horst and Gale, we already picked you up a bottle of Absolut! And my dad will be pleased to know if I'm really feeling homesick I can turn to a bottle of MGD!

*I got a haircut! Not just a trim either, went back to my chin like I had a few years ago.

Have a great weekend, and we'll have many pictures and things to write about after this weekend! Tschüss!

RHCP!!

Kevin just got back at around 4 this morning from a three day road trip with 2 games. The boys won their game on Sunday 6-5 and lost 4-3 on Tuesday. Kev had his first point in regular season games with an assist Sunday night. With the boys out of town for a few days, us girls didn't want to be lonely so Sunday night we got some tickets to the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the O2 World Arena (the arena the boys play in). We scored pretty awesome seats for getting our tickets the day of the show and the Chili Peppers put on a pretty amazing performance! I was also lucky enough to get a text from Bea during the show saying I didn't have to come nanny the next day. Which obviously meant I got to give in to a few extra drinks with the girls!

Since the boys had a long road trip, Shannon and I made them a pretty epic brunch today complete with chocolate chip banana pancakes! So delish! I have had all week off so far so it is back to work for me tomorrow. Kev has an away game on Friday and then they are finally back home on Sunday for a game. I can't wait to see him play again!

At the beginning of next month, Kev has a week long break in the season so we have started looking for places to take a vacation for 4 or 5 days! The Scherenbergs recommended Barcelona to us and Italy is also at the top of our list! Any suggestions??

I'll just leave you with some pics from our concert (And Laira, a vid for you!)! Tschüss!

Cat and Shan with serious moves