Mom's Visit & Paris

It's been just over a week now since my Mom left after her first visit to London. She was here for 10 busy days in which I saw more of London than I've seen in 2 and a half years. It was great to finally show her where/how we live and to be able to see some things I've wanted to see in London but haven't been able to drag Mark along to (which I can totally understand since he saw most of the tourist attractions around London when he was a kid in school). We went to quite a few markets (Borough Market-the food market, Spitalfields Market-our local market and Portabello Road-the antiques market), took a tour of the Tower of London, went the the National Gallery Museum, saw the amazing Leeds Castle and spent two fantastic days in Paris.

To be honest, I've never really wanted to go to Paris but it's so easy to get there from here (just over 2 hours on a fast train that goes 186 mph!) that I thought it would be an easy trip for us to conquer-me being pregnant and exhausted all of the time and my Mom not having travelled abroad before. Paris was such an amazing experience-literally just as I had imagined it to be with lots of cute little shops, people dressed super glamorously and lots of people smoking outside at little cafes all around the city. We saw the Louvre, did the Eiffel Tower, walked the Seine, saw Notre Dame and visited about a dozen little French bakeries along the way.

It was a great time and I'm really happy to have had this time with my Mom. It was great to tell her our news in person rather than on the phone and to be able to listen to her share a few stories about when she was pregnant with me. It also reminded me that even though it's hard to live so far away from my "real" home, I'm pretty lucky to live in such an amazing place and to have been able to travel as much as I have since I moved over here.