I got back on Friday from London, and I am tired, happy to be home, and on a croissant induced high.  I was there for two weeks with my Masters program.  We were studying the history or architecture and interiors as well as developing our sketching.  It was a great experience.  Taking two weeks out of life was difficult, but I learned a ton and I’m so glad to have had the opportunity.

View from my flat

Favorites

Favorite Building

Brighton Royal Pavilion was the first building where I have walked into a room and been left speechless.  It had the most remarkable interiors I’ve ever seen.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside and I was so bummed, it was breathtaking.  It was built in the late 1700′s as a royal palace.  Its style was chinoiserie (Chinese) and Indian, or how they thought Chinese and Indian interiors and architecture was back then.  In the Great Hall their is a massive chandelier that has a dragon at the top… take a look at some photos on Flickr that other people snapped of the chandelier (tisk tisk! but thanks!).

Experience

Visiting Harrods.  I was not prepared for Harrods- who knew it was such a tourist destination, it had such amazingly beautiful interiors, and most importantly, the best chocolate I have ever had (Prestat).  And I don’t take this lightly, I am a connoisseur of chocolate.  Which leads me to…

Favorite Food

Being in Europe, and being next door to France, I made it my duty to eat at least one chocolate croissant a day.  Let me tell you, we don’t make croissants like they do in Europe.  Is there anything better that bread + chocolate?

I was told to also try steak and ale pie while over their, a traditional English pub food.  It was good!  Honestly you could make anything in puff pastry and I would love it.

Ben’s Cookies- my sister hounded me to get some cookies from Ben’s while I was there.  They were delish- very cakey, and I am more of a chewy cookie girl, but really, really good nonetheless.

Favorite City

Richmond, Richmond, Richmond. (Not to be confused with Richmond, Virginia, which is also lovely).  Richmond, England sits right on the Thames outside of London.  It has the most charming riverside.  It is also where a lot of celebrities live (Brad + Angie, Mick Jagger…).  We ate at the cute little pub pictured above.  The town is a must-see if you are in the area.

Notting Hill in London is a close second.  The word of my visit was ‘charming’, everything was just so lovely, and Notting Hill embodied the charm of London.

Things I Will Not Miss

Breathing in cigarette smoke constantly, because everyone smokes.  Inhaling cigarette smoke = instant migraine for me.

Europeans inability, or lack of desire to form neat and orderly lines (or queues).  This always drives me CRAZY when I am in Europe.  Get in line, don’t cut, first come, first serve!

Things I Learned

• America is the best country on earth (well, I didn’t learn this, it just reaffirmed the truth).
• There are some good looking men in England.  I think it’s the way they dress- they (mostly) are all very polished and put together, very dapper.  American men, take note! (FYI- there is a whole tumblr dedicated to Hot British Men?!)
• Diaper = Nappy.
• Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother are on TV ALL THE TIME.  Subsequently, Big Bang Theory is incredibly obnoxious, not a fan.
• Fish and Chips did not kill me.  I don’t eat seafood, but I really wanted to try fish and chips.  The fried batter part was great… the fish, not so much.
• To quick sketch… my sketching went to a whole new level.  I learned the art of quickly sketching something, not getting so bogged down on details, but quickly capturing an image.

Image Source

I’m not sure why, but in the last few weeks my cell phone has exploded with calls from telemarketers, obviously from India, wondering if I knew about super low car insurance rates.  I have been fairly polite so far, but it’s gotten to the beyond annoying point, so I feel it is time for me to take this situation into my control and make them regret ever calling me.

Ideas:

• When they call, act very excited, then ask if they can wait a minute while I get a pen to write down what they are saying, set the phone down and leave them waiting till either my phone dies or they hang up.
• Offer to buy the car insurance IF they can name all 50 states in reverse alphabetical order.
• Sing anything Celine Dion to them.
• Quiz them on general U.S. government knowledge like: name the 3 branches of government, name our current Vice President, or ask who the 16th President was.
• Tell them Julie is dead and start wailing.
• Demand they give me their cell phone number so I can call them 5 times a day.

Any other ideas?

I don’t know about you, but when we were younger, my sisters and I would watch the same few movies over and over and over. Seriously, every one of the movies below I probably saw dozens of times.

Hook- Rufio! Rufio! Rufio!

Robin Hood Men in Tights- This is probably the one we watched the most- like probably once a week.  What can I say my dad was a widower and probably didn’t know how to keep us occupied.

A League of Their Own- Now that I think about it, I’m not sure this movie was 100% appropriate for kids in elementary school.  Nevertheless, it’s a classic.

Wild Heart’s Can’t Be Broken- This is one I haven’t seen in years, but oh my were we obsessed with it.  I’m sure it’s not as popular and well known as the others, so let me give you a recap.  There is a girl who rides horses that jump off these platforms at carnivals, it makes her blind, she gets married?  I can’t really remember.  Time to add it to my Netflix queue.

Can we all just agree that the 90s were the golden age of family friendly movies?

I’m off to London for two weeks for a super quick study abroad, so toodle loo!  Posts are scheduled to go up, so enjoy!  Find me on Twitter or Instagram at @thejuliedaniel for a play by play of the shenanigans.

Image Source

For parts 1 and 2 click here and here…

On to the cruise.  We get on the ship, and within the first day or two my little sister Katherine comes down with the flu.  Baaaad time, she was in bed for a few days and missed one or two of our port days, poor baby.  She really felt nar-sty.  Being the brat that I am, and being the baby that she is, she was whining asking what on earth could I do to help her feel better.  We had already raided the ship’s gift shop or dayquil, nyquil, sudafed and everything in between.  So feeling silly, I recommended that she rub the soles of her feet with vicks vap-o-rub, as I had hear that that helped with colds (I had never heard that, but it was really funny to see my sister Claire rubbing Vicks into Katherine’s feet).

I have two pairs of J.Crew flip flops that I have had since college.  They are the kind with the elastic straps.  If you have them, you understand my love for them, why if someone ever took them from me I would be flip-a-table-over crazy mad.  The problem is, I’ve had them so long there is 0% traction on them.  This presented a problem when I first boarded the ship.  We had not even left port yet and THREE times I wiped. out.  Like legs came out from under me, the world went into slow motion, and I slammed down hard on my rear end.  People, gasped, people started, people ran to my aid.  I call them my water skates, because if they meet the least bit of water it is MAN DOWN.  It was the beginning of the cruise and we hadn’t had out bags delivered to our rooms yet, for the first few hours I couldn’t change shoes and I was slipping and sliding all over the place.  Of course.

By 8:00 that night, my sister Claire had still not had her bag delivered to our room.   She naturally began to freak out that she wouldn’t have any clothes the whole trip, I calmed her down and assured her that someone had probably accidentally grabbed it and it would turn up.  We ended up going down to the front desk to see what the deal is.  We get there and tell them her name.  “Claire Daniel?  You’re bag has been confiscated.  A weapon was found in it so you will need to go to security on deck 3 to claim it.”  Weapon?  Then it dawned on us, we had all gotten Cutco kitchen knives for Christmas.  I had left mine at home, but since Claire and Katherine were flying straight back home after the cruise they took theirs with them.  Somehow Katherine’s slipped through the cracks, but Claire, the dangerous criminal she is, had to go down to the bowels of the ship to reclaim her bag and sign a waiver so that they could hold her “weapon” for the length of the cruise.  When we got down there, I couldn’t control myself laughing, her bag had a big thing of tape on it that said “CONFISCATE- KNIFE.”  The security guards did not think it was as funny.

I often get migraines.  The range from meh pretty bad to oh-Lord-Jesus-if-I-could-peel-myself-off-the-floor-to-call-911-I-would.  On one of our port days I got a migraine that was somewhere in the middle, which means it was pretty bad.  By the time I got back on the ship with my two sisters I was about to black out from pain.  There was a spa attendant down near the gangway so my sisters asked her where the nearest place as to get Advil.  She was such a sweet, sweet woman.  (Shout out to Princess Cruise lines, you all rocked).  Seeing that I was in obvious pain, she sat me down right there on the floor of the lobby, in front of everyone embarking (rebarking? I don’t know) the ship and proceeded to give me the. most. amazing. head massage ever.  It was glorious.  I didn’t care that people were looking, or that I was only in a skirt and a bikini top and my tummy rolls were lopping over.  Bless her heart, my head felt 75% better within two minutes.

At this point in time I had no idea where I was or what was happening…

Nor did I care that everyone and their uncle was staring at me…

All I know is it felt really good…

And thank the Lord for sisters who will seize the opportunity to snap ridiculous photos of you…

On ship they had a huge movie screen above one of the pools, on which they played episodes of The Love Boat on a loop.  I had never seen LB before, but before long I was hooked.  I couldn’t help but wonder what was with the episode upson episode of LB.   About 35 episodes in, I was watching one show when I saw the Princess Cruise Lines logo (our cruise line) on the ship in the show.  I was pretty darn excited that I was on the love boat, and still 5 months later am having LB withdrawals.

Remember when I said that my parent’s would pay for pretty much everything minus what we spend on the ship?  And how that seemed totally fine to me?  See this picture below?  That is the face of a girl who found out the last night of her cruise that SHE HAD RACKED UP AN $1,100 DOLLAR SHOP BILL.  What?  Huh?  How?

Umm, wait a minute…

Call in the sisters to help me analyze… I only remember buying two rum punches??

Y’o.m.g y’all, I spent $1,100 buckaroos!

Well, I know partly how.  It may have had something to do with one of the best ways I have spent my money in a long time, a $300 anti-cellulite treatment in the spa.  What was going through my mind when I booked this?  I don’t know.  You know how you go on vacation and lose all sense of what is normal and reality.  Obviously in that moment, I NEEDED the $300 cellulite treatment, because after the cruise no one would see me in a bikini until months later, so this totally made perfect sense.

Let me explain the cellulite treatment.  You go into a little massage/ facial type room, get completely neked minus a pair of disposable undies, and a sweet technician hooks up EKG type probes to your problem areas.  You lay down on a seaweed/ clay type mat thing to which the probes are attached, and she cranks up the power.  It sends some sort of shock to your muscles, supposedly increasing blood flow and kicking out the toxins.  Your muscles contract and release and IT HURTS.  My sister did it as well, on her second treatment (we each did three), the technician left the room.  My sister was in so much pain she started banging on the wall of the treatment room and screaming (that poor person who was getting a massage next door) and screaming until someone came to help her.  At the end of the treatment, the technician would applaud you and say “Congratulations! you are down ⅛ of an inch!  How do you feel?”  Umm… like 10 probes caused my thigh fat to spasm uncontrollably for 30 minutes?  It was, to say the least, not the wisest thing I’ve spend my money on in 2013.

Princess Key

On one of the stops the whole family decided to snorkel.  Me, being lazy, and my sister, just beginning to recover from the flu, ended up just floating on our backs for a good 90% of our allotted snorkel time.  Money well spent if you ask me.

When we got back to land after our snorkel outing, we hung out on the beach at Turks and Caicos for a bit before we got back on the ship.  We grabbed a few beach chairs and enjoyed the view.  Before I explain what happened next, let me give you some details.  Last summer I went on a beach day trip with some girls from my church.  I am not a huge reader, but I knew that I wanted to grab something light and breezy to have for the day.  So I walked into Barnes & Noble, saw 50 Shades of Grey prominently advertised, so I picked it up.  Honest to Gosh, this was my thought process: “Oh I’ve heard of that book.  I have no idea what it’s about, but I hear it’s an easy read and a lot of people like it.”  Swear, pinky promise, I had NO IDEA what it was about otherwise I would have never, ever read it, let alone bring it to a beach trip with friends from CHURCH of all places.  Ok, back to the Turks and Caicos.  I was now on book 3 of the 50 Shades Trilogy, against my better judgement, I continued to read it.  YES, it is horrible writing.  YES, it is disgusting.  But I HAD to know what happened to Anastasia.  (Still do, didn’t make it through book 3 by the end of the cruise).  So there I am on the beach in T&C.  I throw my 50 Shades book down on the beach chair.  I leave for a few minutes because my dad made me go look at the astronaut exhibit (long story, just google Turks and Caicos and shuttle landing).  So here I am walking back to the beach chair after looking at how Neil Armstrong had landed in the ocean or something or other, and I see my dad pick up my 50 Shades book and start reading at the spot I was currently on.  Dear. God. No.  Life went in to slow motion.  I tried running but my legs weighed like 1,000 pounds.  Please Lord, let him put it down.  After what seemed like 8,000 hours, I make it back to him and hit it out of his hands.  ”STOP. NOW.”  I open it up to see what he had been reading.  It was, of course, the absolute last page you would ever want your father to be reading.  Seriously, there is some weird stuff in the trilogy, and this was one of the worst.

The book is so ridiculous, my sisters demanded ‘story time’ when we were back in our cabin.  Several times throughout the cruise we would lay in our bunk beds and I would read aloud to them selected scenes from 50 shades.  If you haven’t tried reading it aloud, you are in for a good laugh.  It really is ridiculous.

And that concludes the Daniel Family Vacation 2012-2013.  Hold onto your hats for next year!

For part 1, click here.

Now, let’s move on to the fun stuff.

I had been begging and pleading with my dad for years to let us go on another cruise.  We went on one back when I was in highschool and I had a blast.  You either love cruises or hate them, and I love them, I crave them (anyone want to go on a cruise with me, I’m totally in).  My dad loves them, Jane is not a fan, so therefore my pleads were in vain.  My sisters and I got to talking, and decided, you know what, we are adults, let’s just go on our own cruise.  We found a great New Year’s cruise that left out of Manhattan (where my older sister lives), it was cheap, had a few great stops in the Caribbean, all was golden.  I called my dad to tell him the good news.  Now take into mind that my dad was in the Navy, has owned a sailboat my whole life and the majority of his adult life, and while he would never admit it, he would be absolutely thrilled to go on another cruise, but has been holding back his excitement due to my Jane’s decided lack of excitement for cruises (“they are so redneck.”) (which I have to admit, they kinda are, but I love ‘em).  Upon hearing the news that my sisters and I were going on a cruise without him, my dad’s reaction was “what? wait. huh? oh. oh. OH. oh. hmm. oh. ok.” (translation: dang, that sounds really awesome, I want to go).  Not 24 hours later I get a phone call from Jane.  The conversation went something like this “Julie, dad told me you all were going on a cruise.  Here is the deal.  We will go on the cruise with you, BUT the conditions are that 1) it has to be a 5 star ship (um, great), 2) we will pay for it (yes please), 3) none of the port days will be in the Bahamas (fine with me, not my favorite part of the Caribbean) 4) we will pay for your plane tickets (this is bad how?) and 5) you all will need to pay for anything you spend on the ship (was planning on it anyways).  Suffice it to say, it didn’t take a lot of convincing for my sisters and I to go with the nicer ship, nicer stops, parents are coming option.

The day of our flights out of D.C. arrived.  Due to the weird logistics of one sister living in California, one in New York, and that they would be flying back to their respective cities straight after the cruise, and my parents and I living in the metro D.C. area, we were on two different flights.  My sisters had a great, non-stop 10:00 am flight out of Reagan National airport, which is a good 7-8 minutes from my parent’s house, where they had been crashing since Christmas.  My dad, Jane and I had a 6:00 am flight out of BWI, Baltimore-Washington Airport, aka a good hour away.  Not only that, our flight had a layover in Tampa, which meant that my sisters who left 4 hours later than us actually go to our destination (Ft. Lauderdale) hours before us.  Cue the start of a really great day.

We get to BWI at about 4:00 am.  Despite my careful packing and pre-weighing my suitcase at home to ensure it was not overweight, alas it was 5 pounds overweight.  I chose the option of pulling 5 pounds of junk out rather than paying the fee, so there I am at 4:00 am, in front of everyone else checking in for their flight, with my monster suitcase opened up for the whole world to see, frantically deciding what on earth I could easily pull out.  I grabbed a few pairs of jeans (or jeggings in my case) and shoes and stuffed them in Jane’s suitcase, which was also going to be checked and had plenty of room in it.

I don’t want to air my family’s dirty laundry here, ok just a little bit, so I am going to leave out the details of what happened next, but Jane and I had a slight kerfluffle, to put it lightly, regarding my overpacked suitcase.  So, skip to me sobbing crying while standing at the Southwest check-in counter, grappling on to a pair of hot pink pumps (which I of course did not wear) and my jeggings (which I of course wore, a staple in my wardrobe).  So there I am running through BWI trying to allude Jane (my dad was out parking the car and was going to meet us at the gate) (and yes, I really was running from her), doing my best to get the message to her to just leave me alone, all the while sobbing, groping my hot pink pumps for dear life as I go through security.  The day did not start out well.

We get to Ft. Lauderdale, and hop in a taxi to take us to our “hotel.”  I use the word hotel lightly, more on that later.  We got to FL a day before our cruise left to make sure we didn’t miss the boat (literally, I almost missed a cruise once because I flew out the same day.  ALWAYS fly out a day before).  This allowed us lots of time riding around in taxis through FL.  There apparently is a large Haitian population in FL, and my sweet old father is so very proud of the fact that he speaks, or spoke French at one point in time (30 years ago) so with every single taxi driver he proudly exclaimed that “I speak French. J’ai étudié le français à L’Alliance Française en Washington, D.C.”  (I studied French at the Alliance Francaise in Washington, D.C.).  That’s really the extent of what he remembers, I know he wishes he remembered more as him and my mom met in Paris and the French language is very dear to all of us.  Anyways, over the next day I heard “J’ai étudié le français à L’Alliance Française en Washington, D.C.” several, several times.

Ok, the “hotel.”  Jane told my dad to book a cheap hotel in FL for that one night we were there, and he took that very, very literally.  He booked the. cheapest. hotel. in. all. of. Fort Lauderdale, The Travel Lodge.  The best I can describe it, is that when my sisters and I finally were allowed to enter our room, (we had to wait a good twenty minutes for them to finish cleaning it), there were two men in there raking, yes RAKING something out of the carpet.  There were holes in the bedspreads from moths or bed bugs or who knows what.  There were several missing ceiling tiles.  There for sure in it’s day been at least three murders committed at The FL Travel Lodge (this is unconfirmed, just my suspicion).  The place was just down right nar-sty, and not somewhere I wanted to say if I wanted to leave the hotel without bed bugs.

I spy nasty holes in the comforter…

And a hole in the ceiling where there obviously was a hidden camera…

It took a good 30 minutes of us calling around to find another hotel room, there were another 6 or so cruise ships leaving the next day and the whole city was sold out of hotel rooms.  Thankfully we found a new place a good 25 minutes away, which unfortunately put us all in one room instead of two, but we were so thankful for that sanitary and non-CSI Days Inn.

My sisters and I happy to share a non bed bug infested bed.

The next morning my dad and sisters and I decided to walk to the Waffle House.  Let me state for the record that I was not in favor of this idea.  The motel front desk employee’s reaction to us asking if it was walkable was “uh, I wouldn’t recommend it.”  But we had no car (got to the rental car place too late the day before, as my dad was trying to find a cheap rental car and therefore found the place as far away from the airport as possible), we were hungry, and against my protestations we embarked on the LOOONG (as in, like half a mile) walk to the Waffle House, aka God’s territory.  What’s not to love about Waffle House, it was lovely, charming, it filled my belly and my soul.  It made up for a truly previous crappy day.

I was not happy about having to walk…

Forcing my family to take a breather at a bus stop…

Getting close

I spy a shining city on a hill…

Victorious… If I can walk .2 miles to Waffle House, what CAN’T I do?

To be continued…

This post is very delayed due to several boring reasons, so let’s just jump on in to the first night of Christmas vacation.

I was done with work for the day so I went over to my parent’s house (dad and step mom’s house, step mom hereinafter referred to as Jane [because that is her name]) for the evening since my older sister Claire had made it in to town.  I live about ten minutes away so it’s not too hard to pop over.  I was not there five minutes before I decided “nope, not happening,” got in my car and drove home.  The night involved me walking in the door and immediately being greeted by my sister telling me something like “what are you doing here I told you not to come over tonight.”  I had brought my two dogs with me and Henry, my male dog immediately proceeded to run to the hall bathroom, pull a feminine hygiene product out of the trashcan, and run with it throughout the house.  In that moment he was the happiest dog in the world.  Jane was, to put it lightly, not thrilled.  I immediately grabbed said product out of Henry’s mouth and went to dispose of it in the kitchen trash can.  Jane screamed in horror at the thought of it being disposed of in the kitchen (God forbid!) trashcan, so I then took it back to the hall trash can and God forbid! it couldn’t go there either.  After two or three more attempts Jane ultimately had me go put it in a different bathroom trash can, which still makes no sense to me…. all the while my sister and I are uncontrollably laughing over my several attempts to throw it away followed my Jane’s shrieks.  These shenanigans caused my dad to wake up from his cat nap on the living room couch and yell at me “just go home Julie.”  I was so ticked off at what had just occurred so I decided to get the heck out of dodge.  My dad felt bad about his sleep induced tirade, so he tried to call me over and over, but I wanted to hear none of it.  I just turned off my phone, angry tweeted a bit and went to bed. (Read tweets top to bottom).

I’m not exactly sure how it came about, but due to my dad being upset about how he treated me, and him not being able to get in touch with me, somehow he discovered my twitter account and was able to confirm I was indeed alive and kicking.  According to my sister he then proceeded to read aloud my tweets regarding the evening to her and Jane.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, one truly nutso family.

Christmas day came and went, and I really don’t remember anything too exciting happening.  Well this:

and this, which actually is pretty darn amazing:

And this, Henry the dog playing in the Christmas tree and getting hooked by an ornament:

And then lastly, this:

Before I share the email I sent them, let me give some background.  My sisters and I fight like elementary school kids.  When I watch any of the Kardashian shows, I see a lot of similarities in the way they treat each other and we do.  My sisters and I have obviously never matured beyond the age of 10.  We are goofballs, we hit each other, we scream, we laugh, we gang up on another sister.  At the end of the day it’s all good.  I sent this email to them as a sort of sisterly agreement before our family vacation (a cruise, which I will explain in-depth later) so that we would all be on our best behavior for Jane.  Not 10 minutes later a screen shot of the email was posted on both of their facebooks and they had tagged me.  I never meant to share this with the world, (so pardon the typo), but apparently they thought it was funny.  Without further ado, here is said email.

To be continued…