The Prieto's first great European Adventure

Guess what? We just bought tickets to Europe! We figured there was no better way to do it than to just do it, so we took the plunge and bought two tickets flying into Munich, Germany, for a few weeks in the fall.

What do these photos have in common? They are all places we want to visit. The first is Bavaria, the Southern part of Germany that boasts Munich, blue skies, pretzels and mustard, may poles, and beautiful sequestered villages and lakes...


The next major stop will hopefully be Paris, France. Paris boasts the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa, romance, Jardin Luxembourg, fashionable people wearing fashionable clothing, some of my favorite impressionist artwork at Musee d'Orsay, smooching, river strolls along the Seine, and my favorite mansion-turned-Rodin museum that houses the famous statue called The Thinker...


Next stop? Hopefully (this is all very hopeful, mind you) after winding our way down through France we will find ourselves in Tuscany, Northern Italy. Florence is one of our main destinations, but we're hoping to spend some time in the smaller villages too, biking and enjoying the break from big city-ness. Tuscany (and Florence specifically) boasts the best buns in rock (Michelangelo's David), Cathedrals galore, the perfect Tuscan countryside, cypress trees - my favorite tree, incredible gelato, more than enough marble sculptures to fill a sketch book, and the promise of being able to sail paper airplanes with anonymous love notes off the top of Brunelleschi's dome, which covers the capella of the Duomo - the tallest cathedral in Florence...


Finally, on our way back to Munich, the plan is to stop in Switzerland and jump on some trains. And not the trains that take you places you want to be, but rather, the trains that are where you want to be - the trains that give view to the incredible countryside of Switzerland, so beautiful that you might think it is a toblerone induced mirage...

Switzerland boasts chocolate, watches-banks-and-knives (Marcos would be unhappy without this addition), the Alps, chocolate, the Glacier Express and other must-ride train routes, beautiful towns like Lucerne, Basel, and Bern, mountain hiking, and chocolate.


This is just the tentative itinerary, and budget will determine in the end where we go and what we do, but it just makes us so happy to crack open the travel books we borrowed from the library and read about these places and their interesting histories. If you have any suggestions or must sees, add a comment and we will look into it! The plan is to go without much in terms of reservations *gasp*, so that we can leave room for spontaneity.