Hi again!
In case you forgot about this little blog…hello! I’m resurrecting it yet again. This thing has more lives than a cat at this point.
I’m coming to you today because I decided I wanted to write about my trips again! Last time I did it was…the surprise cruise? Our last Europe trip? Who knows. I’m certainly not keeping track. I have a lot of fun making vlogs about my vacations (check them out if you haven’t already!) – I’m slowly working through everything right now, but I kind of wanted to go back to my roots a little bit and write things out while it’s still (relatively) fresh. So… here we go!
I’ll also be sprinkling throughout some of the tips and things we learned along the way, plus links to my favorite travel gear. Omg I’m getting so excited to do this already lol
For this first post I’ll just give a little introduction/character roundup/context for the trip. Since I haven’t written on here in ages you may be a new reader or you may have forgotten everything since I last wrote. I wouldn’t blame you.
For this vacation we went to Europe, with stops in Paris, Barcelona and Andorra! I’d been to Paris before (you can watch my vlogs from the last time here) and LOVE it there, but Barcelona was all new for me, so exciting!
Here’s the cast of characters for this trip:
Me! In case you are unaware, hi my name is Kaela. As I said, this trip was my second time to Paris (we last went in 2019) and first time to Barcelona. On the trip we celebrated my 30th birthday! Yay!
My husband Chris (aka Mr. Kaela). This was Chris’s first time to Barcelona too, and like me, he fell in love with Paris when we went a few years ago and was super excited to go back! Something else to note about Chris is that he eats a gluten free diet so we had an extra challenge finding food this trip (spoiler: it was not actually that hard and we had some incredible GF food in both cities!)
Next up we have my best friend Sarah! Sarah is one of my favorite travel companions, we’ve been on so many trips together at this point so you may recognize her from previous ones (she’s in the vlogs from Costa Rica, California, New Orleans…the list goes on!) She’s been to Europe before but this trip was her first time in both cities, and we also celebrated Sarah’s birthday on this trip! Taurus power!!
Our final guests were Brandon (left) and Andy! Brandon is another one of my best friends, we met when working for Disney back in 2013 (!) and this was shockingly only my second time traveling with him! You may recognize him from the Disneyland/Las Vegas trip back in 2019. Andy is Brandon’s partner! They’ve been together for almost 5 years and there may have been a special surprise at the end of this trip 💍🤫 but I won’t get ahead of myself! Another thing to note is that Andy is vegan so we tracked down some amazing vegan restaurants to try on the trip – and we were not disappointed!
Oh, and – Andy had been to Europe before but this was Brandon’s first time ever leaving the country!!!!! It was so exciting and special to be there with him for his first international trip.
That segues nicely into the WHY behind this trip. For a moment, rewind in your mind to early March 2020. The calm before the storm, if you will. The last few days before everything changed.
Back in March 2020, back when Chris and I lived in Florida and worked at Disney, literally the WEEK BEFORE the parks closed because of COVID and our lives changed forever – Brandon and Andy came to visit us in Orlando.
We had a super fun trip, completely ignorant to the craziness that was about to be unleashed on our lives.
During this trip, Brandon and I started talking about traveling together internationally. I told him how much I loved Paris and we started to make plans to go together. We were set on going fall 2020 – he was going to go home and get his passport, we were going to make a spreadsheet, it was a whole thing.
Then…well, you know what happened then. He went home and got his passport alright – and that’s about where that ends lol
So after two years of uncertainty, anxiety, lots of fits thrown on my end about how we were never gonna be able to travel again and we had wasted our youth (I may be exaggerating) – we started talking about it again. And this time the stars aligned and it all worked out!
So now that you know the who, the where, the why – I can’t wait to tell you all about it 🙂 Brandon, Sarah and I took the lead on planning (our spreadsheet is BEAUTIFUL) and it paid off because we had such an incredible time!
We spent a gorgeous 10 days in Europe, eating AMAZING food, taking in all the sights, and pretending we spoke French and Spanish like locals. Also, it really reignited the travel bug in me so there will definitely be more trips to come soon!
That’s all for today – next post I’ll tell you all about our first travel day and arrival in Paris! If you’re hankering for more travel content before then, I have a whole library of other travel vlogs for you on my youtube channel (and hopefully more to come soon!) 💕
xo! Kaela
