The Adventure Begins!

Hello out there! It's Katie here, typing all the way from Antwerp, Belgium. Ryan and I are excited to welcome you to our travel blog!! We have relocated to Belgium for a few months, which we are thrilled about, and we thought it would be fun to share our quirky little adventure with our friends and family. Our cell phone communication with home (the States) has been drastically impacted because of excessive international costs, so please feel free to gchat, facebook or skype with us!!  We hope you enjoy our posts ;). 

Ryan and I had many visitors the days leading up to our trip!! It was so nice to spend quality time with our family and friends before we left!! The night before our flight my parents were over helping with last minute packing and my brother and his girlfriend came by for a glass of wine. We also got to hangout with Ryan's little sis, who had the very important job of safely delivering our animal-baby Martha to his Mom. She has graciously offered to take care of our doggie while we are away! We couldn't be more grateful! 

We departed from SFO on September 29th (special thanks to my Mom for taking us to the airport and to my Dad for the goodbye hug that morning:)). We were so excited to get upgraded for the first leg of our trip and even more thrilled when we noticed our friend Cody was on the same flight and only two rows away from us!! It was also my first time experiencing business class on United!!!! Wow I got spoiled :).

Cody and Ryan classing it up in Business

 We circled O'Hare Airport a few times making us late for our next flight! Thankfully our departing flight gate was running distance from our arrival gate. We arrived in Belgium around 9:30 AM and our 13 +/- hour travel time to Brussels went very smoothly all in all. We were warmly welcomed by Ryan's friend and former colleague Laurens who picked us up and drove us to his hometown of Antwerp. Laurens was so kind to drop us at our "home" (for the first week of being here) and then later came back to take us out for our first Belgium Welcome Beer! YUM!

right after we made it onto
our second flight... we barely made it!