What a long night! Our travels actually began late on Sunday, May 28. It was recital weekend and the performance wasn't over until around 10 PM. Fortunately, we packed up the van earlier in the day and were ready to go post recital. After a long week of recital AND trip preparation, John and I were tired and just wanted to fuel up with some coffee for the 3 hour road trip to mom and dad's in Gurnee. Do you know how hard it is to find an open coffee house in the Champaign-Urbana area after 10 PM? Ask John. He can tell you what a joy it was. After driving to two different go to spots, we finally settled for McDonald's coffee (which by the way is undrinkably hot for about 5 minutes) and headed to Gurnee. With three hours of sleep and last minute paring down of luggage, we were off to O'Hare the next day to our first stop-Minneapolis. Traveling with the Pagapops (aka Pagadragons) is always an adventure or chaos, depending on which one of us you ask. When we init
Last week, John's dad and sister postponing their trip to France until July left us with the prospect of a 4-day weekend without any plans. We knew we had to take advantage of the long weekend but our idea to drive along the Loire and visit chateaus for a little wine-tasting didn't seem as enticing without John's family. On top of that, we thought that without Pop-pop and Auntie Lisa, the drive might just bore the girls. Last minute beach plans and rentals were out of the question as all of those would have been rented out months ago. We've learned that if a holiday is coming up in France, booking travel and hotel reservations in advance is a must. With all this in mind, we decided to take the plunge and check out Disneyland Paris, formerly known as Eurodisney. Perhaps the hardest part of this Disney experience was navigating the website. After juggling problems with the English (UK version) and French sections of the site for half a day, I was finally able to ord