Top Ten

Top Ten from our recent travels...
(In no particular order)

10.Notre Dame
We had a great time when our friend, Phil, went up the 350+ steps to the top towers of Notre Dame. It is one of the most spectacular structures I have ever been in.





9. Hanging out on the river in Paris with Abby and Brian. We loved how relaxed the city was on these warm, quiet nights. The best part was when someone showed up with an upright piano and a small drum kit and a crowd over over 100 gathered to sing along with this impromptu outdoor piano bar.


8. Playing with fire in Prague. There's only one place in the world where you can have a proper flaming glass of absinth, so we went for it!


7. Parks!


This is in the Kew Gardens in London. These lilypads are literally 2 feet wide!


We had a little too much fun on the merry-go-round at this park in Glasgow.


6. Ashley.
She's our good friend from MN who showed us around Liverpool and Manchester. It was the first stop on the journey, what a great way to start!


5. Climbing down a mountain in the Swiss Alps







4. Time with friends
Manu and the little daughter of our hosts in Swizterland

Soren and Andy with the hats they traded


3. The monuments in Berlin

This one goes deeper into the ground as you walk into it, so the blocks get taller and taller.

This includes the Jewish Museum in Berlin. We thought this museum was great because they had a couple of rooms that were like installments. This one was amazing. You got to walk all around this room that had these iron faces on them. The room wasn' very big, but the ceiling went up at least 3 stories, so the sound of these clanking iron pieces was so loud and melodic.



2. The East Side Gallery in Berlin. The Berlin Wall was an amazing thing to see, espicially this portion of it where artists have made it into their canvas.





1. Home Sweet Home, our lovely Thames River in London on our last night. There are no words and no pictures to express how much I miss that life, those people, and that place. What a gift the past two years have been. I have faith that what comes next can only be better!

More to Come

Hello everyone!

Just a very quick update. I will post more stories and pictures soon. In a nutshell, we had a wonderful time traveling in August. My twin sister, Abby, and her boyfriend Brian joined us for part of the trip when we went to Paris, Prague and Berlin. Then Andy and I met up with Soren and Manuella in their hometown in Switzerland. We are so grateful for that time of travel, it was inspiring and renewing in so many ways.
Now we're back in Minnesota and slowly adjusting to life here on the farm. We live with Andy's parents and Andy has been spending the past few weeks doing carpentry with his dad. I have a new job doing massage therapy with in a chiropractic clinic and I'm loving it. It feels strange to be back and I often feel like any moment now we'll pack up our bags and go back to our little flat in London and I'll go back to my job in Knightsbridge. It's bittersweet. I think once we're in a good daily routine, it will feel more like home. In the meantime, I'm just enjoying each day. Each day I observe something in nature that I never noticed before (like for instance, the sky seems so big out here with the fields and rolling hills), each day I reconnect with an old friend that I havent't talked with, and each day Andy and I talk about how to make our dreams a reality. We just celebrated our 4th anniversary yesterday. It was so nice to celebrate the past 4 years and just be content knowing that right now in this very moment, we are in a very good place.
I hope that all of you are in a good place, wherever you are.
Peace, Mandy