Ryan's here!

Okay, there was no way I was going to keep up with this blog during the wedding week. Nor, as you'll soon understand, during the subsequent month of crazy that followed. I'll do my best to back-date these and capture the experiences as best I remember them going down. Welcome to my wedding week:

You know the wedding countdown clock is really ticking when family members start landing in your time zone. Over the weekend, while I was partying it up with my ladies, my parents and aunt landed in London. And another cousin and his girlfriend are already on this side of the Atlantic. Finally, yesterday, Ryan arrived. When the cousin who hit all life's major milestones with you—first communion, proms, graduations—arrives in town, it definitely makes the wedding atmosphere feel more real.

Hahaha, poor Ryan, he looks so overwhelmed by that crazy cousin to his right.

Ryan and me, living it up after our first communion.

After we met at the airport and headed back to my parents' hotel to drop off our bags, we had an afternoon of time and London at our fingertips. We did our best, and the London weather more or less behaved.

London, baby! An afternoon was all it took to hit many of the major sites: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the Globe Theatre, Tower Bridge, and of course a couple of pubs.

We woke ambitiously early the following morning. After all, it was only Tuesday, and the wedding wasn't until Saturday. Plenty of time for touristing!

Ambitiously early wake-ups do not preclude essential tourist travel shots.

Thanks to a free birthday trip-for-two National Express (bus) voucher to be used before the end of April, Ryan and I were headed to Canterbury, the very place of the namesake tales in every* high school English curriculum. *Every anglophone high school— Nicolas had no idea why we thought this destination was so funny.

Canterbury, beyond the tales

If quaint medieval English town is what you're after, you can't go wrong in Canterbury. We basically wandered around aimlessly and I fielded wedding- and visa-related emails as my phone pinged throughout the day. Our highlight was stumbling across Saint Augstine's Abbey. This place was seriously old, one of the first bastions of Christendom in England. We're talking 3-digit-years-on-their-gravestones old. And we were the only ones there, left totally free to roam, climb over, and lounge on top of any historical artefact. Not that we would ever do anything that disrespectful. We history buffs? Never.

That time we crashed Saint Augustine's Abbey. (Sad word choice, as there were thugs paid by the crown to actually crash this place back when the Catholic Church was being cleared from England.)

After dining in a restaurant literally older than our home country, we caught a bus and some shut eye.

We ate dinner here in a 517 year old building. Because Canterbury.

With a troupe of family scheduled to arrive in Brighton the following day, it was time to snag some beauty rest while I still could.