4 Countries 1 Day

Blueberry scones!

We're finally in England!  We've  been anticipating this trip for a solid 6 months and we are here at last.  Travelling was a chore as always..  We live in the Seattle area, and for pricing purposes we bought tickets that flew out of Vancouver up in Canada: about a three hour drive from home.  It was a lovely day out and we got to Vancouver in plenty of time to drive around a little and find a decent bite to eat before our long flight.

So we were desperate on the road for the nearest bite to eat, so without caring too much for selection or price we went for the nearest place with a kitchen.  In a botanical park on the side of the road there was a fancy looking little place called Shaughnessy, which had a great range of fresh sounding foods from breakfast to dinner.  When you pop in for brunch they start you off with some delicious looking and smelling blueberry scones.  The butteryness was smelt several yards away from the table, and I was soo ready for these babies.  I had never thought of it but these truly do make a really nice appetizer.

Hannah's Vegetable Crepes w/ Green Salad

Hannah ordered the vegetable crepes, which seemed to be a perfect brunch meal.  The crepe was nice and thin with the signature slight eggy hint, very nice.  Stuffed perfectly with a bit more egg and plenty of chopped veggies with a bit of cheese.  Very fluffy and full of flavor.  The crepe was accompanied by a very clean and fresh looking green salad, a fine accompaniment for a fufilling brunch.

My chicken, mozz, lettuce and tomato panini

Being a lover of sandwiches and burgers (an American) I ordered a panini.  Inside this tightly packed grilled sammich I found tender roasted chicken, fresh tomato, lettuce, and very fresh tasting mozzarella cheese.  This was one of the better panini sandwiches I've had in my life, given that a lot of times when I order a panini it is packed so fat that the contents want to slide right out, however it wasn't the case this time, as everything stayed very centrally within the bread, making it delicious.

Bacon-like almonds

After a little bit in the Vancouver airport, with no delays we had boarded our KLM flight for our layover in Amsterdam Schipol airport (3 hours).  On the plane Hannah and I felt like we were in the serious minority speaking English on the dominantly Dutch speaking plane, but no big deal considering that most of Europe has some command of the English language, and I never want to offend anyone's culture.  These almonds you see in the picture above were some of the best plane nuts I've ever had!  They called them smoky almonds, and they SERIOUSLY had some smoky almost bacon like flavor.  Great!

BBQ Chicken

On to dinner.  On a transatlantic flight it is hard to expect a 5 star meal, but KLM did alright.  They had two choices for dinner: BBQ chicken and a salmon pasta dish.  Being people that like to try everything we got one of each.  At first I had the chicken and Hannah the salmon, however Hannah not being too hot on fish sometimes switched with me, which was fine.  The chicken was nice, had a sweet flavor, nothing spectacular but not bad for an airplane.  On the side was some nice yellow rice which tasted like it came off of an airplane..  The salmon pasta was alright, I didn't really like the sauce they put over it, but the whole dish wasn't terrible, something to eat on a long flight.  Both dishes had a little potato salad on the side which was alright, again, nothing to get too excited about.  They offered some butter and crackers with everything which were good, and for desert they had a chocolate chip cake, the flavor was good and sweet but the cake was a little dry.  

Salmon Pasta

When we finally landed at Amsterdam-Schipol we were both really beat, and I think the size of Schipol really took us for a ride.  That place is ENORMOUS and there certainly is a good amount of shopping to be done.  I picked up a few treats.  We also got something to drink after the long flight.  I felt like a cold beer, and what beer to get in Holland other than Heineken.  Hannah felt like a warm-booster so we got a cappiccino too.  We had packed a lot of our own snacks so we thought it was ample time to eat some.  We had our vegan beef jerky which was spicy thai peanut flavor.  Kinda funky tasting it in jerky but we still thought it was good.  Also we had these nori sticks, which were basically a flavored filling (curry in this case) wrapped in a seaweed-like film and it was..ok.  I really liked the curry filling but I'm not sure how well it goes with the fish flavor of the nori.  We still ate it.

Cappuccino with creamer

The beer of Holland

After all the travel and commotion we finally got on our last little plane to London Heathrow airport, met up with Hannah's Grandad and made it back to their place in Surrey county, East of London.  We were absolutely exhausted and went to bed shortly after.  More to come :)