Hogwarts Great Hall

Like everyone else in the world, we love Harry Potter.  (Honestly, I don't know anyone who dislikes the series but there may be naysayers out there.)  Yes, the books are better than the movies but the movies do an amazing job of capturing Rowling's magical world.  So, when we found out that Warner Brothers opened its Harry Potter backlot to the public last year, we had to go.  The tour took us through the most impressive of the backlot stages at Hogwarts, including the Great Hall, the Gryffindor common room and boys' dormitory, Dumbledore's office, and the Potions classroom.  We walked through the the lifesize Diagon Alley, replete with Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes and Ollivander's wand shop.  We gawked at every tiny detail on display --- most of which we would never even notice when watching the movies --- from the type of dishes used in the Great Hall to the substances found in the potions jars. We tried Butterbeer which, frankly, I found to taste a lot like a super sweet cream soda (yuck) but Patrick liked it.   We stood beneath the rainbow array of wand boxes and we walked across the bridge that Harry frequented.  We wandered around the amazing model of Hogwarts used to film most of the movie scenes and watched it light up inside as "night" stole over the set.

Did we love the studio tour?  Of course.  It was magical.

. . . keep reading the harry potter studio tour after the jump

Cherry blossoms in Bulgarian countryside

This year, I'm sitting in my own house in Atlanta, watching the last of the cherry blossoms fall from the trees in our backyard.  Last year, at this time, we were in Bulgaria, watching the cherry blossoms bloom.

View of Svirachi village (our house is the one in the very center with the white walls around it)

Bulgaria was a choice of necessity.  We had to find a country that would accept Chewy and Abby without additional paperwork that was also outside of the Schengen zone since we had already used up our days within the Schengen countries and acceptable to our car insurance (Serbia, as it turns out, is not European car insurance-friendly).  So, we ended up taking the long way from Budapest to Turkey, via Romania and Bulgaria.

Views of Svirachi village

Bulgaria has some big tourist attractions but our timing was off: March was too early to enjoy the Black Sea beaches and too late to enjoy the ski resorts.  Instead, we decided to hunker down and get some work done in an out-of-the-way spot and found a Flipkey rental house deep in southern Bulgaria, close to the Greek and Turkish borders. 

Views of Sofia, including guards, Hagia Sofia, and wishes for babies and fertility tied on trees in the springtime

We spent a night in Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria, in a high rise Hilton (because Chewy and Abby only stay at the best), next to an American-sized mall with a McDonalds across the street.  Eighty miles past Sofia, we jumped from the trappings of the 21st century to the 19th century . . . or Amish country.