Home again, home again (188)

We made it home alive and well at around 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday. I'm so glad to be here. I enjoyed my vacation very much, but it was time for it to be done. I never realized how much I appreciate my car until I went to Europe and had to walk or take a train everywhere. It wasn't like we were walking 15 miles a day, but we were walking all. day. I'm not necessarily a great walker either. I don't really get many chances to practice. I don't live in a very walkable neighborhood. I can take casual strolls, but that's about it. If I need to go to the grocery store, I need to take my car if I want to get there and back in a timely manner. I'm also a little on the slow side because I take these stupid little baby steps. Ryan's normal walking pace is very fast and he has a really long stride. I had to run sometimes just to keep up with him. Jerk. :0) I had to remind him quite often that he needed to slow down. I'm not in fantastic shape, but I'm not in terrible shape either. He's just really fast. I'm not going to say that I enjoyed every minute of the walking, but I will say that it wasn't always terrible. Also, I do have to admit that all of the walking improved my health and my butt. (Alright already Ryan. I'll try harder to keep up with the exercise.) By about the 4th day I noticed that my pants were fitting a little bit loose. I weighed myself when I got home and I've lost 10 pounds. Maybe I should go on vacation more often.

We would walk or take the trains from one end of each city to the other. We usually started sometime between 9:00-10:00 and didn't go back to our hotel until 9:00-10:00 at night. I did really well and didn't complain (other then asking Ryan to slow down, it wasn't a race and we didn't have to rush everywhere) until 7:00 p.m. Sunday night. My feet suddenly cramped up and screamed "ENOUGH!" I'm sorry to say that I had a bit of a melt down. I just wanted to get where we wanted to go and I didn't want it to take an hour to get there. I wasn't really feeling physically tired, I was more tired mentally. We crammed a lot of stuff into each day. Ryan was kind enough to slow down and let me catch up, then stop and let me sit for an hour to eat dinner. I was able to continue on pretty well after that. I didn't have another meltdown until Tuesday afternoon. We had an 8 hour layover in New York. So, we took the train from JFK into the city and walked around some more. I really was excited to get to see the things that we were trying to get to, but I didn't want to have to walk more just to see them. I was ready to throw in the towel, head back to the airport and just sit on my butt for 6 hours. I'm going to blame this on the fact that I had been up since 4:30 in the morning Paris time, had just spent 8 hours on an airplane and didn't really sleep while on it. I'm not the nicest person when I'm tired, hungry, irritated, etc. I'm glad Ryan put up with the meltdowns and we came home still liking each other.