Saturday Funday and New Planned Euro Adventures

Hi Everyone,

We hope that you are having a great week.  It has been typical summer weather here in London with a lot of clouds and temps in the 60's.  We are off to Florida on Saturday for the Knapp Summer Vacation in Watercolor, and incredibly excited about sitting on the beach and relaxing, as well as a few rounds of golf.  We are psyched to see my whole family, including 5 energetic little girls.  Ann just got back late last night from a quick 36 hour trip to Paris.  She has been working so much and can't wait to completely shut off next week, well as much as a Senior Director can do!!

This last weekend was the first weekend without visitors and scheduled plans, so we thoroughly enjoyed taking it as it came.  We have to give a shout out to Ann's cousin Brittney and her new husband Steve.  They got married on Saturday in Elkhart Lake in Wisconsin, so we sadly had to miss a great time.

Our main goal on Saturday was to get some trips planned for ourselves.  We have a lot of visitors arriving again in August and continuing into November, so we needed to take advantage of some of our free weekends and also good weather in Europe.  We were able to get the first weekend in August booked for Copenhagen, Denmark, and then the last weekend in August booked for Tallinn, Estonia, on the Gulf of Finland.  We have heard fantastic things about both of these places.  We also got our trip booked this week to Dublin with our good friends Patrick and Susie when they are here visiting in September.  We are also taking an unbelievable cruise with my parents at the end of September leaving from Istanbul, Turkey, cruising through the Turkish and Greek Isles and finishing in Athens.  I may or may not return after that trip!!!

So, after our productive morning, we decided to head up to a village just north of London called Hampstead.  Our friend Beth came with us, and wow did we find some incredible places.  We stopped for lunch in an awesome 19th century pub called the Garden Gate.  They had a beautiful beer garden.  I had been told by a co-worker about another pub called The Spaniards Inn, which was just on the North side of Hampstead Heath( a huge park and green space).  We walked from the Garden Gate up around the Park and found this incredible Inn.  The Spaniards Inn is a traditional English country pub that was built around 1585.  The pic on the top is of Ann and I standing outside of this place.  They had one of the most amazing beer gardens that I have ever seen.  If you are visiting us in London, please insist on going there.  I do not need much of an excuse.  Anyway, after a pitcher of Pimms in the sun, we decided that we should not interfere with the good vibe that we had rolling, so we continued the pub crawl into another area of London called Angel.  A few pubs later, some great cuban food at a place called Cuba Libre(unoriginal name), and another pub or two after that, we had ourselves quite a Saturday.  It was completely spontaneous, and as you know, those are some of the best days.

I guess that about wraps it up for now.  Since I will be on holiday next week, so will the Blog.  I will make sure and have a good update from Florida when we return.  As always, we miss you all and can't wait see you soon or later.

Cheers
Kevin and Ann