More gray and cold. Ugh. Though the weather hasn’t been great we have been fortunate that our time in Belgium has prepared us for this sort of climate. And of course it just brings me back to my time here in 1995; it has felt like October for the past two days. Jonathan was voting for a trip to Pfaueninsel (peacock island) despite the weather. I think I overruled him however and it was a good thing. It was a cold and windy day and once again everyone had multiple layers of t-shirts to try and stay warm. We decided to [View Full Entry]

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It is hard to believe it is the end of July and almost two months of our adventure are behind us. I often wonder what the readjustment period to life back in Massachusetts will be like. We are so lucky to be having this experience. The kids are really getting something out of all this; you can tell by the questions they are asking. By taking them out of their comfort zone and introducing them to all sorts of new things they are really becoming inquisitive of the world around them. This morning we woke to gray clouds again. It seemed [View Full Entry]

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Again Eliza woke up early, this time at 6:30. Ugh. She cuddled in bed with us for about an hour and then Jonathan got up with her. I stayed in bed until about 8am and the girls woke around 8:30. We had breakfast and then the girls had a bath. By the time we got going it started pouring. Luckily the girls were content to play and the storm passed quickly. Still the weather dictated our plans for the day and we headed out around 10:30 to go to the Natural History Museum. We stopped en route, once again, and had [View Full Entry]

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NOTE: As some of you know this web site lost it's server and all of my previous blogs. I will just start posting new stuff and perhaps if I have the inclination will go back through my journal and repost old entries. Here we go... Travel Day. Why is it that no matter where you are traveling to travel days seem to be infinite in length? We had an afternoon flight to Berlin which worked out well because we weren’t rushing around but it also left more time open for anticipation and excitement. Jonathan worked from home for a little while [View Full Entry]

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Holland, Netherlands, Niederland…anyway you say it, that is a great country. There is just a whole different vibe in the Netherlands versus other parts of Europe. The Flemish part of Belgium has a little of that feel but it just isn’t the same. I had read about this place, Kinderdijk which has the largest concentration of windmills and I thought it would be a great place to take the kids. It was very complicated to get there via public transportation so we rented a car for the day. Renting a car here is not cheap, but we figured that once [View Full Entry]

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Well, I will start this by saying that perhaps it was my doubts last night about our trip that foreshadowed our “adventures”. I had been hoping that the weekend trip went well. I really enjoy planning things but I am always a little nervous that things won’t go well and I will be to blame. But if you never put yourself out there then you run the risk of not doing or seeing anything, which is even scarier than any problems we could encounter on a weekend trip in Europe, right? In addition to these nerves was this feeling that [View Full Entry]

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Got up this morning around 8am. I had packed a lunch last night for everyone so we just had breakfast and got ready to go. Caught the 9:18 bus to the train station and met the Clausen family Christian, Zoe & Henry). We ended up buying a 10 ride train ticket for 69 euro and sharing it with them. This ride would have cost us about 31 euro total, but with the pass worked out to be about 28, so we saved a little something. We caught the 10:02 train to Brugges. The kids had a good time on the train. [View Full Entry]

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Two high speed trains. One metro. One tram ride. A few boat rides. And a camel. Okay, so there was no camel, but the rest is true. Because you need reservations to travel any of the high speed trains, with or without a eurail pass, we were limited in what we could get from Lyon to Paris on only a few days notice. Next trip we will plan our times well in advance. So our train left Lyon at 8am. That meant getting up and showered at 6 and, gulp, waking all three sleeping children to dress them, walk across [View Full Entry]

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Today we got up around 8am. I took a very short run to get the blood flowing while the girls and Jonathan had breakfast. Emma, Eliza and I had gone out for the obligatory chocolate chip breadsticks and pastries. We got dressed and walked across the Rhone to the T-1 tram line and took it to the train station to catch a 10:24 train to Grenoble. The scenery changed from meadows of sunflowers and cows to some spectacular mountains as we approached the French Alps. We didn’t really have any big agenda on our trip to Grenoble, but a friend [View Full Entry]

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I woke up around 7am to a very silent apartment. I stayed in bed until I heard Emma awake around 8 am. We dressed quietly and went out to the patisserie and got more chocolate chip bread sticks for breakfast. When we returned Abigail was awake, but Eliza remained asleep until 9:30!! Jonathan woke up and tried to sort out his appointment at the University of Lyon, the whole purpose of our trip and yet they hadn’t been in contact with him in weeks. It turns out that their email was down so he made arrangements via the cell phone [View Full Entry]

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