Mallorca, finally!

Rene and I are leaving for Belgium tonight! We're staying the night at his parents' house and then we're driving their car down for the weekend for the Belgian Grand Prix! Of course I know not many of you are interested in Formula 1, but I'm extremely excited to be going! However, it's going to be pretty chilly and possibly a little rainy. But I'm not going to let that dampen my enthusiasm (haha, I know, cheap pun)! I packed lots of sweaters and I'm going to bring my toasty warm new coat that I bought! I decided that it was a worthy buy since it's cute, but most importantly it has inner elastic cuffs around the wrist so none of that pesky wind can go up my sleeves while cycling!

Ok, so time to tell a little about Mallorca, since I don't want to fall too far behind on my updates, and I'll have a lot to tell once we get back from Belgium!

Our honeymoon got off to a pretty rocky start. I'm going to blame it all on jet lag, since we got up very late the day we left, but I know it's really our fault for leaving everything to the last minute (yes mommy, I know what you've always tried to tell me all these years . . .) Well, I think we've learned our lesson, because anything that could go wrong did. Basically, we forgot Rene's phone charger so we couldn't use his phone at all, we forgot Rene's drivers' license so I had to drive the rental car (thankfully my US license was acceptable!), Rene forgot his wallet at his parents' house (so his parents had to drive back to get it and drive back to the airport, all in the nick of time because we almost missed our flight!), our paperwork for the rental car reservation didn't have the name of the local dealer so we didn't know from where to get our car (but thankfully we called Sunnycars and they straightened us our!), and the directions I printed out from google maps to get to the hotel were wrong (but Rene used his fabulous cartography skills to use the map the rental place gave us to get us there!)

But once we got through all that, the rest of the week was spectacular!!

Our hotels were amazing! We picked two that were very similar: very small with only 6-8 rooms with lots of stone walls and floors. The first one was in Moscari, which is a tiiiiiiny little village (I'm mean, one road through the village small) at the foot of the mountains, and the second hotel was in Alcudia, which was in a bigger walled town on a peninsula in between two long strips of beaches.

Our time in Moscari was fun! We explored the surrounding towns, including Inca, Campanet, and Selva, discovering that siesta is a real thing, and that you shouldn't try to go shopping anywhere during the entire afternoon. We slept a lot to finally kick that awful jet lag, and we went swimming in the hotel pool. We kind of just relaxed a lot because we were in the middle of nowhere, and we hadn't done any research on what there is to do around there (yes, another "way to go, Rene and Kimberly, on the planning part").

The one street through Moscari

Our lovely room

Rene taking in the view of the mountains behind the hotel pool

On our last full day there, we met a woman who works at the hotel, who happens to be Dutch, and we asked her where we should go to explore the mountains a go hiking a bit. She showed us a few places on the map that she likes to go to, but she warned us that the roads through the mountains are really windy! And boy was she right!

The roads were just a serious of hairpin turns up the mountain, with barely enough room for two cars, and often not enough room at all! And as we got closer to Sa Calobra, we had many scary encounters with enormous double decker tour buses, where all the cars coming opposite the buses had to pull over as close to the edge (of the mountain, mind you!) or back up to find a place wide enough to do so, and then hold their breath as the bus JUST squeezed by.

just a bit of the windy narrow roads!

Rene and Kimberly . . . and the ice cream, of course!

But the drive, terrifying as it may have been, was really fun, and we saw some magnificent views from the sides and tops of the mountains! We even stopped at a rest point and climbed the top of a mountain- and it was really climbing, not just hiking! It was super fun!

the mountain top we climbed

And the destination was wonderful as well! Sa Calobra is a tiny little area of the coast with two coves and a bunch of little touristy restaurants. It was everything you would imagine and island vacation to look like: beautiful blue water, rocky cliffs, open ocean!

Sa Calobra

Alcudia was a different experience: much more touristy, with much more stuff to do! The first full day there we did the island beach experience and spent the day soaking up the sun.

Our hotel room in Alcudia

The beach in Pollenca

The second day we went go-karting!!! It was SUPER FUN but also SUPER EXPENSIVE! Haha! But what are honeymoon's for other than spending money?!



Then after karting we decided on a whim to drive back up through the mountains and explore the other two villages that the Dutch lady suggested to us. That was a LONG day, and the hamburgers we had at the end of it in beautiful Valldemossa were HEAVENLY!

The decided to relax on the last full day at the beach. We headed over the other other strip of beach, but as I was buying postcards, I realized that I wanted to go to a more beautiful and less crowded beach instead of the super touristy packed in beach that we were at. So I asked at the tourist office if they any suggestions, and when we got to where the lady had pointed us to, it turned out to be the exact place as in the postcard that inspired me in the first place! And it was BEAUTIFUL!!



So that's the not so concise summary of our trip! I have so much more to tell, and a gazillion more pictures to show, but I've already rambled on enough! Re-entry into real life was a little tough, but things are going swimmingly now, and we off for the weekend again (really, we won't always be traveling this much! it's all part of the "honeymoon" thing) I'll let you know how my long awaited Formal 1 trip goes when we get back!

Tot later!