Europe trip coming up, hypomania insuing....

Enjoy your trip, bizi! It's good you called your pdoc ahead of time to prepare, just in case there's a flare up in symptoms, so that way you can continue managing and get the most out of your trip as possible! It definitely sounds like you are organized, so just be careful not to overstress! I get like that too before trips....I buy tons of the same thing and get in my head that I need all this stuff for "backup," when really it's overboard. Trip planning gives me a lot of anxiety, and I've been hypomanic while trip planning, but please try to maintain a balance between being prepared and taking it easy. Breathe and try to relax to prevent burnout

I already miss europe, feel remorseful that I was not more adventurous with food. I ate 3 meals of lasagna for crying out loud!!!!!
also it was just a blur. I will post more...
bizi

Un fortunately, I am already forgetting the details of our trip.
I had to ask jeff about the time that we sat out doors at a fancy cafe and had espressos and listened to a quartet, playing classical music, and a mixture of styles, even a tango.. It was in the huge piazza(plaza) of St. marks catherdral in venise. This piazza floods frequently now during high tides, Venice is sinking.
I promise that I will post more pictures.
While having diner one night in paris we listened to a famous chillean guitar player. He was good. During dinner That night a younger, 28 year old, parisan man sitting next to us, befriended us and spoke excellent english. At 2am he invited us to go to a bar with them, some friends that were with him and we declined. It was too late and something was just not right, call it a feeling but hind sight I was suspicious of his overly friendly behavior. I realized this later the next day.

Jeff was brave in venise. One night for dinner he decided to have the cuttlefish with pasta and a black sauce. He ate it and thought the cuttle fish was good and thought the sauce was interesting. After dinner, I had to ask the staff what was the dish, jeff did not want to know. I HAD to know so insisted on asking.
The cuttle fish was in the squid family and the black sauce was ink.
It was shocking!!!!
Jeff said it was not bad but that he would never order that again.

our hotel in paris (4 nights)was directly across from the only scottish pub in paris. It was called the pure malt. Soccer is huge there and it was during some games and the pub was hoping. We drank good scottish beer called Innis & gunn, kind of a sweet/dark beer, served in very tall glasses.
The euro was worth more than the us dollar. about 1.16 to the dollar.

In italy we stayed at air B&B 3 times
3 nights in rome, 2 nights in florence, 2 nights in venise. 2 of the 3 places were in lofts such that jeff kept hitting his head on the sloping ceilings!
They served a simple breakfast. Sometimes just small hard packaged toast with butter and jam. and always espresso. With a machine and small cups to insert into the maker. I grew to really like espresso! Here My coffee is so bland now, we are looking into buying a machine.

WE saw so many churches that were beautiful with ancient architecture and stained glass windows. In venise, we took an evening tour of St. Marks Basilica and it was fabulous! They lite all of the lights and every thing was in gold in the 3 domed church and was breath takingly beautiful. We were not allowed to take pictures so this is my only post card that I bought.
In florance we went thru the duomo church and the accademia art museum with a 17 foot tall sculpture of david by michealangilo. It was amazing!!

Rome was fantastic, seeing the colleseum/roman forum, and the pantheon (dedicated to all of the roman gods)which is amazingly intact for being almost 2,000 years old(I believe) and we saw all of this during both the day and the night all lite up was fantastic!
We missed a whole day from over sleeping, we had not set our alarms. Missed 2 tours but were able to reschedule one the next day combining both tours so we were so glad to be able to do that.

In paris we went up 400 stairs of the towers of Notre Dame and saw the magnificent Gargoyles and the inner supporting framework for the towers.
The views were spectacular.
Took many tours along our trip to avoid long waiting lines. Many of the sites we had to go thru security.
We saw an interesting catacombs in paris, some close to 6 million people bones had been moved to this site and they layed them in a fashion to create art works out of bones, very interesting and kind of creepy.
We took a ride on a boat up the seine river which was till elevated after the flooding. touring boats were the only vesels on the river , they were the only boats that could fit under the bridges.
The louvere art museum was over whelming. We spent
We saw the Mona lisa and she was smaller than we thought. venice des milo was so beautiful. saw the corination of napolian which was a giant piece.
More to come later.
bizi
We toured the chateau of versailles, a golden palce of kings

Hi Bizi!

Thanks so much for sharing with us!

I don't know as I will get to make it to that region of the world to visit in this lifetime. I am finding your accounts of your trip so fascinating!
I also enjoy knowing both you and Jeff have had such a good time!
It's just so awesome that everything went so well!

I truly appreciate the time you have been taking to share!


WC

Your trip sounds amazing! Thank you for sharing your beautiful picture and for all the glorious details of your trip. It was like you took me on a mini vacation and I really enjoyed my trip it sounds like everything went smooth and I'm really happy for you.

I hear ya on the weight gain. I'm in the same boat. I wish us both luck in evicting the extra chubs out of our lives.

What a wonderful trip!!

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

Thanks for sharing! Very nice picture. I would love to go on a trip like that someday, and I'm determined to make it happen!

I hope you get to go too someday.
I hear you can get much cheaper flights overseas by going thru Istanbul (sp?) the 3rd largest airport in Europe.
But didn't they just have an airport bombing there this past week?
WE paid $1,875pp for airfare from our our home town to rome stopping in atlanta.
If you fly out of houston (which is 4 1/2 hours away from us.)
to istanbul (I don't even know where that is!!!!) the cost is only $700 pp.
But then you would have to figure in airfare to where ever you are going too. I know that the air fare from Venice Italy to paris was only$150 pp.
I also heard later that you can buy groupon travel vouchers for much discounted deals but have not looked into that.
Originally, I thought that would be our last trip but now maybe we can go again.
It took us 10 years of saving $100 a month to have enough for this trip.

Happy weekend!
bizi