when one gets sick, one must find an opportunity

it is officially september. this is the month i have been dreading as the beginning of school is so close. mark and i recently joked that we really should have concentrated on not having one of the most brilliant summers of our lives as maybe we would want to go back to our routines...sigh.

i know i will be done soon, but these next months are going to be hard and challenging. it seems a little daunting. i just keep repeating my mantra, one step at a time, so i don't get too ahead of myself (and start to freak out, ha ha).

today is also a day that is quite chilly, a little rainy and all around the beginning of fall. i thought it was a good time to reminisce about some more happy honeymoon memories. london! there is no way that london was as chilly as it appears today, however it was chillier compared to all the other warm places we went to.

but why did we go to london exactly. this was never part of the plan. everyone knows it as it was in our program at the wedding. london was our "spontaneous" part of the trip. before leaving mark, much to his dismay, had a four day gap where we had no where to be or go. i found this part kind of exciting.

"we could just hop on a train, and go," i would tell him.

he really wasn't having this. mark plans vacations and he is most excellent at doing this. he plans what we do, where to go, how we will get there. all things are in place. the idea of being spontaneous was not according to the plan....but neither was getting sick.

we were just leaving paris on our way to the hike when mark started to feel sick. the previous night he did not feel great, coughing a great deal. then we got to chamonix and he started to run a fever. this was extremely unfortunate due to the circumstances as the next day we were suppose to start our hike. luckily, we could take a bus from chamonix to argentiere. which is just what we did, seeing if we could ride our this cold and get some hiking in...

then i got sick. ugh. regardless, we decided the next day we were going to do the hike (another time and post to talk about that). but overall, it was obvious to both of us, that hiking may not be the best thing to do when trying to get better from a cold.

so because we were busing (instead of hiking to hotels). AND we would spend the majority of our time in our hotel room watching the olympics, we thought, we might as well join them. hopping on a train, then another train, another train after that, then the chunnel we arrived in london!

AND IT WAS FANTASTIC! something that we never realized was how much we missed fluently talking to other people. we could understand what was going on around us. we could respond. it was lovely. AND we were greeted with volunteers handing out maps of london and offering plenty of advice on how to get where we wanted to go. we traveled to london at the best possible time as the olympics was set up for foreigners to visit the country.

so thank you london. you helped us get well as we could ride your tube, with no troubles. we could rest our weary bodies in hyde park, watching the olympic games. we could check out sights, sounds, and flavours without hiking monstrous heights and worrying about running out of water. london you were grande! and we got better. most would be upset about being sick on their holidays. but it was a minor blip and we thank you london for healing us!

love