Back In The USA !

We are back home and happy to be here. Traveling West has always felt harder on our systems, and this time was no different. The taxi was at Sophie's at 5:45am on Tuesday morning. My plan had been to go to bed at 9pm the night before, but dinner wasn't until 10pm (crazy French). Brian and Ken picked up makings for a salmon dinner with beer margueritas to thank Sophie and Alan for their hospitality. Alan is a doctor, and works 9am-11pm or midnight, but he got off early (10pm) to join us for dinner. Anyway, my point is (remember I have major jet lag) we only had 4 1/2 hours of sleep).

We had a miserable airport experience in Lyon, with Ken needing to declare a purchase we had made and then our entire bag was torn apart. We had ordered a wheelchair for me, thinking it would speed things along....I was wisked away by the body snatchers into a sterile white area away from my travel team. I was not happy, but when I tried to object to the wheelchair "driver" she sweetly leaned over and said "I don't like you". Her English is as good as my French, as I knew by her tone, that was NOT what she meant (maybe?). Anyway, we all were reunited and took the 1 1/2 hour plane trip from Lyon to Paris where we didn't have much of a wait until we boarded Air France from Paris to home. It was over a 10 hour flight ! On Air France they feed you not to long after you board and then turn off the lights until 2 hours before landing when they feed you again. It felt a bit like having a cover put over a bird cage....just be quiet and don' bother us until we take your cover off.

We arrived back to wonderful green, rainy, cool Bellingham at 2:45pm, where Joel picked us up. Jason picked up Jen and Brian and there we seperated for the 1st time in 3 weeks.

Joel helped us settle in, went and bought us some groceries and Ken and I were in bed asleep at 6:30pm (our plan was to stay up until 9pm). We woke up at 4am, so it will take a bit to reset our clocks, but not bad for our 1st morning.

The blog got a bit crazy at times. I would basically just type at the end of a day or during Ken's siesta and add it when we had internet. It isn't as "pretty" as I would like, but neither were we. Thanks again for caring enough to follow us through our adventures. Sally