The Adventures of this Southern Girl : Summer in a Nutshell

I blinked and summer is over! I’ve had a wonderful summer full of new experiences and travel adventures. So, let me try to recap from the beginning!

Summer didn’t come as quickly as it left this year in England and Bestie and I were getting a little impatient to start our tans around mid-June. We jumped on the cheapest last minute flight to somewhere South, beachy and hot to find ourselves lounging on a Grand Canary beach with a big glass of Sangria in our hands. Our new favourite beach past time is listening to books on tape. Bestie hooks up Audible to his portable speaker and the time just flies! We worked on our tans during the day and had nice Spanish traditional meals in the evenings. The most exciting evening we found ourselves in the center of a restaurant where the talent for the night was a midget drag show. I had never dreamed of being able to watch a midget “queen” Whitney Houston spoof sniff a fake (I hope) white powder and fall over (pretend) dead on stage. It was quite a show and quite a trip!

Next up, we headed to Iceland! A couple friends from college got married in Reykjavik on the 4^th of July weekend this year and we decided to make a holiday of it. The wedding was beautiful and the after party was an all nighter! The sun (basically) doesn’t set during the summer months in Iceland which can really mess with one’s internal time clock! At 6 am the dance floor was still hopping, but I managed to make it home just in time to change clothes and pick up our rental car for the “holiday” part of the trip – a road trip across the Southern border of the country.

Iceland is amazing! The vast difference in landscape is something worth seeing. In just a 20 mile ride the weather and landscape could go from beautiful green rolling hills filled with wild flowers as far as the eye could see to dark dried lava fields. In many places the road had been cut through the lava and it stood a good six feet above the road. Driving just a little bit further took us to the largest glacier in Europe. It poked out between the mountains and the cloud cover was thick and cold, a vast difference from the sunny summer we’d driven through 30 minutes before. There were hot springs and cold springs, waterfalls and bubbling sink holes, geysers and meals with the local delicacy, WHALE! Yes, I ate whale. It was so good. I’d eat it again. The roads are still not quite up to par for the mass number of tourists now flooding the country all year long, still I feel it gives Iceland a bit of untouched culture. If you ever plan to make the trip yourself , I have one piece of advice : spend the extra money on a 4x4! The trip was fantastic and goes down on my list of places I’ve been as one of my favorite so far.

This is a highway

Largest glacier in Europe

So for the next part of the story I should probably pause to make mention to all the exciting London events which I’ve been able to take a part of over the summer. I attended Royal Ascot and so did the Queen, making it my first royal spotting! Spent the day at a local music festival, Lovebox, listening to top artists and finishing the festival with, none other than, Snoop Dog! Marched at Gay Pride with my fabulous softball club, completed the London Color Run, had a crazy fun night at the Regression Sessions warehouse rave in Vauxhall and dressed as the mom from The Jetsons’ at Rugby 7s, a sporting event where everyone dresses in a ‘fancy’ dress theme set by the event organizers. This year’s theme was galaxy. This is where a special Irish boy entered the story, we will call him WIC (aka White Irish Catholic) for the sake of the blog. I’ll save you all the gushy details but we’ve been chillin’ ever since.

Fabulous hat at Royal Ascot

Mrs. Jetson & MIB at Rugby 7s

It’s because of WIC that I found myself on a flight to Dublin the day we landed from Iceland. We spent a lovely weekend hanging with his friends and even fit in a little bit of tourist fun with a Guinness Factory tour! I must admit I enjoyed Dublin a lot more this time than on my first visit (more than 5 years ago) and I hope we make trips back a regular occurrence.

Next up Bestie and I boarded a plane to Barcelona with four other fun girl friends for a tour of the east coast of Spain. We spent three days touring all Gaudi’s masterpieces, every one of them even more magnificent than the last.

La Sagrada Familia

Then we boarded a train to Valencia for the highlight of the trip; La Tomatina! La Tomatina is a massive tomato fight which takes place once a year about an hour outside Valencia in Bunol. Approximately 20,000 people crowd into the tiny village street (yes, just one) and around 170,000 tons of tomatoes are dumped for a massive food fight. The festival kicks off with grown men scrambling to the top of a very high, very greased, with lard, pole to get a ham. The whole thing is rather barbaric but hilarious. After the fight there are two options to get clean, either locals bring out water hoses and spray people down or you can head to the river to wash with hundreds of other tomato covered souls. It’s all pretty gross if you think about it and the rashes that covered our bodies for the next few days brought some concern to the germs we might have shared with strangers, but I definitely will be left with a memory that will last forever! We ended the trip in Alicante where we laid in the sun, drank sangria and recovered from the holiday.

Trucks at La Tomatina delivering the tomatoes

La Tomatina

Next up is Bestie’s 30^th birthday, a wine weekend in South France with the girls, home for a week for a trip to Texas for the Texas A&M verses South Carolina football game, finishing the year off with a Nile river cruise for Christmas and Cairo for New Years, so stay tuned!

Here's a few more pictures from the summer for your viewing pleasure...