Yesterday, we packed up, left the kiddos at Oma & Opa's house, and took off for our week-long honeymoon/10 year anniversary trip to Iceland. We've never been away from the kids for this long or been this far away. We're on another land mass, over 1500 miles away, for goodness sakes! I almost had a moment while saying goodbye to the kids, but I managed to hold it together and slip out while Oma distracted them all with gummi bears. Once we'd checked in at the Frankfurt airport, we ate lunch at the McDonald's, like we always do, but it was weird looking at the giant rocket playspace and knowing none of our kids was in there.

Our plane arrived at the gate just as we did - not a good sign - which meant we had a long delay. But we were so high on alone, grown-up vaca vibes that we didn't mind at all. While we were waiting, the flight crew kept paging Vijay Singh. I'm not sure if he was just a late passenger with a famous name or if they simply needed a consult on some tricky golf shot. We were not informed either way. Once in the plane, there was another delay - we'd missed our spot for take-off and now were in a traffic jam - but we were still riding high, so we played around with the in-flight entertainment system. The survey appeared to be a fascinating psychological experiment.

oooh, that's a tricky one

Or not. We nearly wet ourselves when we came across this in the in-flight duty free shopping magazine: "...Tooth brush, tooth paste, Mirror..." and...

i really hope that's a typo

"Ear pugs"?! That was enough to keep us laughing until take-off, when we were treated to an awesome view of the German landscape: little villages nestled between green quadrants of agriculture.

It was a perfectly clear, sunny day over Germany and northern Europe. We could even see ships out in the North Sea.

container ships below the islands of Helgoland

We met with clouds and turbulence about halfway through the trip. The cloud cover was cool though.

And as we approached Iceland, the island was shrouded in clouds, making it appear even more mysterious and exciting.

Iceland, here we come!