When one of your very best friends has a baby, you must go visit, right? So, as planned from the start of our journey, we would arrive in England about three weeks after our dear friends Sarah and Charley welcomed their first bundle of joy. Because you can’t really plan for a baby’s arrival, we ended up arriving one week after baby arrived. Probably not the most ideal time to arrive, but we couldn’t really change our plans – Jacob was two weeks late!

Of course we knew that things would be crazy and Sarah and Charley would likely be sleep deprived, but they told us to come anyway. Luckily Sarah’s brother, and our good friend, Paul, lives down the street from them and he graciously put us up (and put up with us) for the week. After being on the road for almost eight months, we were looking forward to sitting around, being lazy, drinking lots of tea, and getting in all the baby cuddles we could. So we did a whole lot of that. Jacob is the best baby! He’s so chilled out and Shawn and I loved hanging out with him.

We did do more than just cuddle baby Jacob and change some nappies! One of the days we went to Sarah’s parents’, Martin and Carol’s house for dinner and beers. Martin and Carol are like our English parents and we love them, so we were very happy to get some time in with them. We also got to visit Sarah’s friend Nicola and her twin boys, Jack and Noah. Another day, we ventured out to Romney with Sarah, Charley, and Jacob. We visited the abbey there and wandered around town.

One of the days we went to Winchester. Sarah took me to visit Winchester in 2011, and I loved it, so I wanted to take Shawn to see it. We first went to the Winchester Cathedral, a magnificent piece of architecture and well-maintained. It is the resting place of Jane Austen! After wandering around Winchester, we met up with Paul for lunch. He works in Winchester so he took us to his favorite pub, The Old Vine. We then went to visit his office and try on some sweet construction jackets (he’s an architect and wears them on site-visits).

 

All in all, it was a great week, full of relaxing time with our friends and little Jacob. We are so glad we had this week to recharge before kicking off our last big adventure: Africa!