You're A Peein'! Europe 2012!

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012 Mar, Mom, and I left for Portland. We stopped to see Jewell at her new apartment in Beaverton... I can't believe she's married!! It was super fun to catch up with her. Then we went to see Lauren Kearsley, who just got home from serving a mission in the Mormon Battalion Visitor's Center in San Diego. She is soooo skinny now, but just as funny! Marissa was also there with her baby Gray, who is super hilarious. Mandy Lemmon also came to Kearsley's, so it was a party! We decided to go eat at Red Robin, then BJ and Mom went to see the Browns, who were in town. It was cool to see them, but I didn't do a ton of catching up with them; they went back to their hotel room and just Elizabeth stayed. I completely blew off Chelsea Earl and Michael Pham, so I have to see them when I get back from Europe! I haven't seen Chelse in years, and I miss her far too much. At the end of the night, we went to find a hotel, but there were no vacancies anywhere! We were like Mary and Joseph, except no one was pregnant. We finally found a place a this super sketchy little motel in Aloha. When Mom was checking in, the guy asked what brought us to Hillsboro and she mentioned that we were going to Europe, then she spent the rest of the night freaking out because he was going to think we were rich and rob us. She has been freaking out since we made plans to go to Europe. Wednesday, July 25th Mom and I went to breakfast with Debbie, then Evelyn came later. I have missed spending time with them, even if they are my mom's friends. We ate at the Shari's in the Sunset Esplanade, then we hurried to go get Mar, check out of the hotel, and go visit Julie before we went to the airport. Lindy was visiting family in California, so I didn't get to see her (BUMMER!). I don't even know where Kyle and Caleb were, but the only kids home were Jacob, Ashley, and Ammon. They were super fun and cute, as usual. I always hate leaving friends, but I was excited to get a move on! We got to the airport with barely enough time, so we were starting to panic. Thank goodness all of our luggage was under 50 lbs, we didn't have any knives or liquids, blah blah blah, so we did not miss our flight. The flight was 9 hours long, and they fed us like 4 times. We got peanuts and pretzels at first, which I thought would be the only free food - wrong! We then got pasta, salad, bread, and a brownie. I was like sweet! Then later, they gave us a roll with turkey and ham, so it was like a mini sandwich, you know? It was pretty good, too. THEN they gave us a banana, orange juice (like they have at elementary schools in the cylinder shaped thing with the foil top that you peel back to drink), and this sausage roll type thing, which was actually pretty good too. They also had free movies, TV, and music for the whole plane ride, with individual screens on the back of every seat. Delta is amazing! They really take care of their customers. They also have this really cool "track your flight" thing where you can see exactly where you are... At one point, we opened our window cover and looked down and saw lots of ice. I jokingly said "Looks like we're flying over Greenland!" We looked at the tracker thing and we seriously were! We could SEE Greenland! It was soo cool. I watched the movie Joyful Noise, which was the worst movie ever (I fastforwarded through most of the music - ESPECIALLY when Dolly Parton was singin, ick), part of Sherlock Holmes (I just can't get into it for some reason, plus I was kinda doing Sodoku), and I watched the Hunger Games basically on fast-forward. Wednesday turned into Thursday at some point, but I'm not really sure when (we lost hours due to time difference and we didn't sleep on the plane). So that was the first 9 hour flight. Then we had a 4 hour layover in the Amsterdam airport, but it didn't seem as long because we had to find our gate, go through security again, blah blah. That is THE coolest airport ever! There are lounges, a library, a sleeping area, all sorts of shops and things, plus it's just very clean and nice... I loved it. We could have spent more time there! Haha. I wish we would have done a little excursion or something, but Mar was NOT willing to leave the airport. And neither of us had slept on the 9 hour flight, which left Portland around 1pm, so we were pretty pooped! When we got to our gate, we really, REALLY just wanted to hurry up and get on our plane, but we were so early the flight before ours hadn't even boarded haha. So we tried to stay awake, but as soon as we got on the plane, Mar was out. We were separated by a very skinny, dark Dutch girl who said she was in her first trimester of pregnancy and needed extra barf bags. As far as I'm concerned, she never puked, but I was so far gone, I couldn't tell you for certain! We got to Leeds and it was a pretty small airport. We had to go to a different line than most of the other people on our plane because they have different lines of EU passports and everything else. The lady who stamped our passports was "very familiar with Doncaster", though I don't know if that means she's from there or what. Anyway, we were finally in England!! We didn't see Catherine, though, and the airport waiting area was teensy, so we went to the regular departures (vs. international), and as we started to walk back to the international side, we saw Cat walking toward the door in her yellow dance team jacket (she's our manager) and bright pink pants. She was dressed for us to spot her! Her dad was driving so we met him first (even though I've met them all via Skype before). It was super weird to see the driver's seat on the other side for real, then driving on the opposite side freaked me out; I kept thinking the oncoming traffic was on the wrong side of the road and that it was going to kill us! Haha. Mar and I could barely stay away to enjoy the scenery, so we dozed a bit. (Okay, we were out.) We got to Cat's and met James and her mom, and I think Joe was there at that point... Maybe we didn't meet him till later, I can't remember. Anywho, so then Cat showed us around. The hallways and stairways are SUPER narrow! I could barely carry my bags up them, it was so crazy. Her room is at the tippy-top of the house, up like 3 flights of stairs - it's a serious work out! Haha. So after we looked around a bit, we were feeling kinda hungry, so we went down the street to the best fish and chip place around! Mar and I don't really like fish, so we got fish cakes, which are like patty looking things that have mashed potatoes in them! And mashed potatoes make everything better. They gave us a million chips, aka fries for the Americans haha. And tell ya what, those chips were sooooo good! They're thick and cripsy... and you can add malt vinegar and salt, which is pretty good, but I prefer them straight. We also eat them with fry sauce, aka mayonnaise and ketchup for the Europeans! Haha. My mom loooves fries like this (the thick kind, you know? No wimpy McD's garbage!) (TO BE CONTINUED...)