Arrived!

After 12 hours of flying, 3 hours of driving, 5 hours of a hellish stopover in London- this is due it's own post as soon as I can bear writing about it-, and very little sleep, we arrived at the Basel/Mulhouse airport around 5:30 pm Friday October 2nd. We were happy to see Denis's parents waiting for us with their car and their truck to hall all of our suitcases. The first two nights were really rough, but last night Etienne slept from 10-6, something close to a real night's sleep, and Xavier from 10-12 and again from 2-6. We made it to Denis's Tata's 70th birthday party yesterday in Rouffach at a quaint little restaurant. The lunch lasted about 5 hours and there were about 5 courses (aperitif, first course of fish and cold meats, second warm course beef stew w/ carrots and mashed potatoes (the creamiest ones I've ever tasted), spetzle (sp?), cheese course, and then many desserts- yummy- wait I didn't mention all of the wine- dry white, red, sweet white mmmm). Of the 5 hours, I think Denis and I sat for about 1/2 each because we were chasing the boys. But, the young cousins also helped to look after them. Etienne was playing hide and seek with Zoe, Elsa, Jeanne, Theo, and Amelia. He didn't eat anything except for many desserts when the time came. Xavier finally did take a nap in the stroller at the restaurant.

I haven't slept, but jet lag is now not as bad as it used to be before kids, believe it or not. Now I'm so used to getting no sleep that it just seems like a normal day that you have to suck it up, drink some coffee and breathe. I was disappointed to recently find out that there are no direct flights from Chicago to Geneva. I thought we were going to be able to fly home directly. We will have to go through Zurich, but that is not too bad. There are however many direct interEurope flights to Geneva.

Now it is time to get down to business: buying a car, getting our blackberries up and running, finding a house, a school for Etienne. We'll be in Alsace until around Oct.18th. We're going to visit my French host family from Angers who now lives near Montlucon in the center of France. We'll stay the night of the 20th with Beatrice and Jean-Paul and then head to Grenbole before we settle into our gite in Prevessin-Moens (http://www.gite-les-demoiselles.fr/index_en.html) We will be in the gite from Oct.22-Nov.7. Hopefully this may give us enough time to find a place to rent.

I was happy to see that there are "pumpkin days" coming up in the village of Masevaux nearby. We can take the boys and at least dress Xavier up in his hand-me-down pumpkin costume. They reassure me that there are now many Halloweeny things here, but I know it won't be the same. Etienne and I are reading Charlie Brown's The Great Pumpkin story that his best friend Jake gave him and he told me he wants to go trick-or-treating. Maybe around CERN we can do that?