This is Nancy writing. Thanks to Rachel and her technological know-how, we now have a family blog! We thought we would have a year full of adventures, and it seems like the adventures started from the beginning. Not all of you know that we were due to leave Baltimore on Monday, August 17 on a 9pm flight. At 3:30 pm, when Sean was doing our online check-in, he discovered (yes) that Noah's passport had expired in June. Uh oh. So we quickly got on line, learned what is necessary for a child's passport renewal, drove over to CVS to get passport photos for Noah, my friend from work Joe came over to our house to notarize Sean's signature that he gave permission for Noah to get the passport renewed with only one parent present, and then Sean and the girls boarded the plane without Noah and me :(. But all the angels were watching over us, and Noah and I got up at 6:30 am, we were at the DC passport office by 8:10, got a perfect parking spot (I knew it would be a good day), got Noah a big lemonade, and went to the passport office. To make a long story short, we had a new passport by 1:30pm, we rebooked for Tuesday night, and British Airways (again the stars aligned) didn't charge us the extra $2,000 per ticket that was threatened.
From Sean's end, the beginning had an adventure, too. He arrived at the Geneva airport with the girls where the very, very nice babysitter/housekeeper of our friend from whom we're subletting the apartment was set to meet our family. She had agreed to come to the airport twice since there were (supposed to be) five of us, and we had so much luggage, and of course it's a small European car. It turned out that she came to the airport along with a sick 3-year old she was watching, brought only Sean and some of the luggage back to the apartment (with the girls waiting in the parking lot with the rest of the luggage and no cell phones, no contacts, etc.), and on the way back told Sean she had to take the 3-year old to the doctor and she couldn't go back to the airport again. So Sean, never having been to Geneva before, started to drive the little car back to get the girls from the airport. The girls had been told Sean would be gone 45 minutes and it ended up being a little more than 2 hours that they sat in the parking lot waiting with no information.... But of course they were troopers!! He arrived, somehow having made his way correctly to the aiport, through rush hour traffic, and there they were!
When Noah and I arrived the next day, the rest of the family were our tour guides. They'd already found the great park across the street, they'd already ridden La Grande Roux (the huge ferris wheel that watches over Geneva), they'd already had ice cream by the lake, and we repeated all of that!
So now we've been here for 12 days, and we have been to Ikea twice (once renting a truck and driving through town), we have had a magnificent hike in the French countryside, the kids have gone swimming twice in Lake Geneva, we have dinner with two sets of "new friends", we have visited their new school and bought school supplies, and we've taken the bus all over the place. Our apartment is beautiful and we're enjoying urban living...
That's it for now. More later from everyone else... (Attached are pictures of the Jet D'eau, less than a mile from our apartment, and La Grande Roux, our local ferris wheel :-D )
