Brief trip report

The honeymoon in France was great! I'm not sure what I can say without getting too wordy, but I'll try to keep it brief.

Our first few days were a gloomy and rainy and we were worried that it was going to carry on the whole time. We tried to make the most of it by doing things that didn't involve being outside too much. We did alright, be you better believe we were happy to see the sun come out and stay out until later in the trip.

Driving in Corsica rules! Even in our little Peugot 206 rental, I don't know if I've ever driven more fun roads. It is km upon km upon km of twisty, mountainous, narrow roads. When you get into a "city", aggressive driving is par for the course which is a-okay with me. My sometimes carsick co-driver was nice enough to indulge my crazy driving most of the time. Those Corsicans sure know how to make some fun roads. I'm going to have to rewatch the WRC Rally Corsica to see if I've been on some of those roads.

As expected, the food was tasty. I would say that our best meals were in the town o f Porto. One night we ate at a restaurant that specialized in dishes with local fish. They only serve the fish that was caught fresh that day by the local fisherman, so of course that was some tasty fresh fish. But the real high point of the meal, was the dessert. We were both trying to decide which desserts to try and then we found out that we could get a sampler platter containing all of their desserts. Holy f-ing shit. I'll post a picture of the platter later, but that was sooooooo good.

The weather wasn't super warm, but we didn't manage to spend some time on the beach. One evening we drove out to the Plage d'Arone to enjoy the beach at sunset. I had forgotten to bring my sandals with me, so I took a lot of pictures while Christine got her feet wet. The beach was beautiful and it was awesome to be there at sunset. We also went to some beaches around Bonifacio in southern Corsica. There's a funny story there that'll I'll have to save for another posting, but it involves a "naturaliste" beach.

Things didn't go too smoothly once we got back to the mainland. We had trouble getting our rental car, which caused us to change our plans a bit. We drove up to the Alps with the hopes of riding up l'Alpe d'Huez (a famous Tour de France mountain pass), but all the bike shops were closed. That area sort of shuts down in October while they take a break between summer tourists and winter tourists. Total bummer, but the area was beautiful. The Alps are amazing; way more dramatic than the Rockies. We'll have to go back there someday and spend some time riding.

We flew from Nice to London to Detroit, where we were stopping for a hometown wedding reception and my 10 year high school reunion. The reception went well. Thanks to my family for putting that together. It was nice to see some family friends as well as some of my high school friends prior to the reunion. The reunion was fun also. I didn't talk to all that many people, but I feel like I got to talk with the people I really cared to talk to. As if it wasn't hard enough to deal with the jet-lag, we were keeping a strange schedule. On Friday night, I think we were out until 1AM and on the night of the reunion we didn't get to bed until sometime after 4AM. I managed to sleep from 10PM until 6:30AM today, so I think I'm finally adjusted.

The trip back to the Detroit airport from Toledo didn't go quite according to plan. We left Toledo with enough to get us to the airport 1.5 hours before the flight, which seemed like plenty of time. We didn't figure in construction. Who does construction on Sunday? Apparently Michigan-DOT. They weren't doing anything major (nothing that couldn't have been done over night like they do in Colorado), but they took 3 lanes of traffic into 1 causing a huge backup. I thought we were pretty much screwed, and I figured we'd be spending the night in Detroit while we waited to fly standby the next day. That didn't make us too excited, because as you can imagine we really wanted to get home after 2 weeks away. We somehow ended up getting to the airport with 2 minutes to spare before the 30 minute cutoff. I couldn't believe it.

I'll post some pictures as soon as I finish going culling, tagging, and renaming all 800+ of them.