Europe, here we come!

We leave today on a two-week vacation to the Netherlands and Germany. I am excited and a little anxious about the trip- excited for all the obvious reasons and anxious mainly about having Hazel cooped up in a plane for almost 10 hours today. We leave this afternoon at 2 pm and arrive in Amsterdam tomorrow morning at 8 am local time (2 am here)- so our total travel time is just about 12 hours. We’re all packed and are spending the morning letting Hazel get all her energy out. We’ve got a short layover in Atlanta, but we plan to let Hazel out to run around the gates before we get on the big plane. Fortunately we are flying in the evening so we are hoping that Hazel will follow her usual 7 pm snooze routine. We’ve packed pajamas, mama and blankie, so hopefully those three things will ensure at least a few hours of sleep on the plane!

Our trip begins in Amsterdam where we will pick up our rental car and drive to the nearby city of Utrecht. We are staying in Utrecht for 4 days and 3 nights and I will be presenting my dissertation research at the Association for Moral Education conference. After a short stay in Utrecht we are heading up to Hindeloopen, a small fishing village known for its paintings. We will be staying there for two nights in an apartment. Jered and I went to Hindeloopen twice when we were growing up and we’re excited to go back with Hazel and explore the area again.

From there it’s off to Siegelsum, a town in Northern Germany where we will be visiting my mom’s cousin and her family. They have a working dairy farm and we can’t wait to show Hazel all of the cows and other animals. We plan to stay with them 2 nights before driving down to Oma’s house in Hanau, Germany where we will spend the remainder of our trip. So, as you can see we have a busy two weeks ahead of us! At some point while we are staying at Oma’s we plan to make the drive down to Heidelberg, the city where we met. We have so many good memories of Heidelberg and I can’t wait to take Hazel back to where it all began for us!

We will be taking as many pictures and short videos as possible, but we most likely won’t be posting them until we return in mid-July. We will be back late on the evening of July 14th, so later that week you can probably expect some picture-heavy posts! We hope everyone enjoys their 4th of July holiday weekend- see you in two weeks!

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