ok, off to dinner

ok, enough time sitting in front of this machine with all of barcelona right outside. we are here at this hostel for a week so i´ll be posting a lot!
i´m having a great time here but i do miss everyone back home. give oregon a hug for me.
we´re off to our first spanish culinary experience! catalan food tonight, i think!

photos of nimes

this is what a street in nimes looks like. this picture looks out on the arena.




for some reason, nimes really likes crocodiles and they are featured everywhere in scupture, engravings, and even as stuffed animals in their gift shops.




oregon big foot lands in the nimes arena. this is really high up in the arena - very challenging to my fear of heights and my horrible clumsiness. garrett climbed up to the top of the arena and got the view from up there while i clung to a railing below.




a hallway in the arena. they still have shows here - from bullfighting to classical music. the animal smell permeates this while place.




here we are in an arch entryway - yes yes, i know, i´ll try to get some variation in our pictures together.

vals revisited

here are the warning bells at the ilanz train station. they look like little helmets!


this is the incredibly quaint town of vals. it´s like the fantasy you had as a child of a town in the swiss alps - only real. you can totally imagine people yodeling here.



here are the neat little graves of some locals behind the church in town.

boom! huge mountain right outside our hotel.

what is there to say about vals? just that it was just about the most perfect place on the planet to unwind, relax, and feel about a million times more healthy. just breathing the swiss mountain air is enough to make you feel like a million bucks. add the baths? forget about it. i have nothing to compare it to but the therme baths are incredible. first, go to the 42 degree centigrade pool and really get warm. get all pruny and sweaty. then move from there to the cold plunge 17 degree pool. squeal a little because it is really cold and shocking. then go back to the 42 degree pool and feel yourself turn into a noodle. go back and forth a few times until you feel the need for some lukewarm temps. hang out in the one of the 30, 33, or 35 degree pools just waiting for you. or, if you feel like communing a little with the swiss mountain air, go to the outdoor pool and float around on your back, staring at the fluffy little clouds. and i can´t forget to mention the steam rooms. or how about the 2 hour massages we got?

garrett and i have decided that we are definitely going back to vals and this time for a longer time. i wish we could have stayed longer...

in barcelona! and paris revisited

we just got into barcelona an hour ago and YAY there´s a place with windows, a usb card reader, AND a normal keyboard. it is about time!

so since i didn´t post any pictures from paris, i´ll do that now.




here we are at the pompadu center. it was a seriously roasting start to the day.

here´s a picture of park andre citroen (the modern park).

the eiffel tower...of course.


my surrogate thomas chilling on the terrace of our paris hotel room.

in nimes

unfortunately, this cyber cafe is running a very strange gaming operating system that requires a cd to read my camera so i cannot post pictures. also? this keyboard makes the one in vals seem simple. so this will be brief but i wanted to write a little something...
yesterday was all about trains. 4 in all and we had to sprint for a few of them. we didn't get to nimes until pretty late and finished the night off watching the tennis us open LIVE - sweet!!!
today we're just cruising around nimes, which on a sunday is a slight bummer since everything is closed. BUT the cyber cafe is open, of course. we had brunch on the rooftop of this modern art museum with a killer view of a roman temple. seriously!! then we wandered through the town and stopped at the roman arena. very old, very profound to be in there thinking of all the people who have wandered through there over the past 2000 years. now we are heading to a huge garden. ok, enough of this keyboard - it is very frustrating for my usual speed demon typing.
tomorrow will be another long train day. we may stop in an internet cafe on tuesday.
we're having a great time!!!
thanks again to everyone reading and posting comments!
garrett is waiting for me on a park bench...

we're in vals

hello everyone,
i'm not going to write much since there's a line for the only public computer here and this is some strange german keyboard with the letters in weird places. but quickly, we're in vals!! we had one last amazing day in paris walking around, seeing a few famous biblioteques, a few famous parks (the luxemborg and some new modern slightly controversial one that i forget the name of), saw an awesome unexpected mongolian throat singing show in front of the pompadu (i probably just butchered the spelling of that) center while eating awesome baguettes we got at a random patisserie. in all, our last full day in paris was wonderful.
we spent most of yesterday on the train. from paris to basel, to chur, to illanz. then we took a 30 minute bus from illanz to vals. talk about a sketchy mountain road. on a few turns, the bus driver had to honk its horn because it was a completely blind turn and down to only one lane. but hello! it's the swiss alps!!! we have one insane view from our hotel room of a huge towering mountain. last night, we used the baths here for the first time. it was amazing. too much to say with this german guy glaring at me to hurry up.
i promise to write more when we get to nimes. and i'll post pics too since we've taken a TON already. i only have 200 pics left on my gig!!
we just finished our morning session at the baths and i'm a limp noodle.
thanks for reading and posting comments!!
love, kathy + garrett (who is still bathing downstairs)

we're here!

after two red eyes, we've arrived in paris! on the first red eye to jfk, neither of us slept a wink on the plane and so hanging out in jfk for EIGHT hours was even more uncomfortable than we thought it would be. we had a few camp-outs in the airport.




we got to our hotel this morning and after washing the plane off us, we immediately went exploring. we saw so much today - the sacre coeur, the paris opera house, the grande palace jardins, we also walked down a great street with lots of cool markets called the rue de martyrs. we're planning on going to the notre dame tomorrow and some famous cemetaries. here are some cool pics from today:









garrett would add some words but he's brain dead. it is 9:45am in our heads and almost dinner time here. we have a rad dinner planned on our hotel room's terrace.