Brighton

This past weekend was a busy one. Saturday night Mark and I had our niece Holly and nephew Max over for a sleepover. It was only last week that Calum and I spent the night at their house but Calum was equally (if not more) excited to have them on his own turf and play with them on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Sunday my friend Jeanne arrived from Seattle for a short stay. Jeanne and I spent 9 months of being the "single" girls together in Seattle before I moved to London and she shares the same passion for travel that I do. I think this is the 4th time she's been here since I moved (which is coming up on 4 years in June!) and since she's done pretty much all the London touristy stuff I thought we should go on a little road trip so we headed to Brighton which is just about my favourite place in the U.K.

Brighton is about an hour south of us on the south coast, it's an artsy town with some great shopping, restaurants and night life and was a perfect place for a weekend away with Mark pre-Calum. It's also featured in one of my top 3 "English" movies, Wimbledon (which comes after 1. Match Point and 2. Love Actually). Unfortunately the weather wasn't amazing but we did have fun walking around, checking out the boardwalk and had an amazing lunch at one of Jamie Oliver's restaurants (followed up by homemade donuts on the pier-so much for my diet!). It was great to have Jeanne here, even if just for a little while, we got to really catch up which is so hard to do when we are home for our usual short, whirwind visits.

Now if only more of you would come visit! Honestly, before I moved I really didn't see the appeal of coming all the way to Europe to come to London, but it is a great stopping over point and you will always have a free place to stay! Wish us luck this week with the move-it only just occured to me last night that we're pretty far behind-as in, haven't packed a box and we move in 9 days (and we seem to have accumulated a lot of crap in the year or so since we last moved). I've got so much to get rid of and go through and we have to somehow squeeze in painting Calum's room back to neutral-AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!