I'm briefly back. This traveling business is pretty overwhleming at times. So I have a few days to relax before I am back on the road again.

The honeymoon was great. Somehow I forgot that I would actually be taking myself on the honeymoon, complete with all my neuroses. So there I was in the most beautiful places in the western world and all I could worry about was how chubby my pants made me look. sort of ridiculous.

So we flew into Madrid, spent three nights there and started getting worried emails from the brother of the sweets. we tried to check in on email every day or two so we weren't that out of touch. Then we moved on to Barcelona. We were going to try to go to either Bilbao or Sevilla but decided that it was going to take too much effort and not worth the work. That and there weren't any trains available within our timespan. So we went to barcelona and missed out on the biggest dance party in the world because our train arrived at 10:00 and the party started at midnight and we didn't have tickets or even know about it really. kind of a bummer. but we had a big fight instead and tried to work out the problems.

i was wearing the chubby pants that day.

then we played around in barcelona and fell in love with modernist architecture like everyone else in the world. We took lots of photos and did a lot of walking and even went for a run in the intense heat. When we were tired of that and our hotel reservations ran out we moved on to Tossa del Mar, along the Costa Brava. A great little beach town where we stayed at a sweet little pensione and laid out on the beach and window shopped and ate more of that awful spanish food. ick: salt, batter and mystery fish. naw, it was okay.

back to barcelona to catch a train to Nice. it was a night train so we had a little time to screw around. turned out not so nice because there was a little near miss incident with a pickpocket. paranoia made us very happy to be out of Barcelona.

Nice was incredibly hot. we laid out on the rocky beach and swam in the clear blue water. then we hid out in a shopping mall to escape the intense heat. oh, how we longed for a siesta!

Another night train to Florence. I've been to Florence before, so I knew what I wanted to see and helped direct sweets so he knew what he wanted to see. I was bitten by the shopping bug and considered buying a few things, but ended up not doing so because it was overpriced and not that special. so we cruised around looking at art and buildings and stumbled upon the most amazing street show ever which included floating balloons with floating people suspended from the balloons and words can't begin to describe what it was really like.

We met with friends B and R at the Florence train station and spent the last week of the honeymoon in a teeny little village in the Chianti region. it was blissful.

and now I am back and I am off again on thursday to fly to california, pick up a car and then drive to montana to do summer research. hopefully I will have some sort of internet access in montana!