How not to cross the Atlantic

As some of you may have heard, Europe was a bit of a mess last week with respect to air travel. Several airports in northern Europe got unusual amounts of snow, which is to say that they got some snow. That's why Stace and the kids got stuck in Switzerland for an extra couple of days (but the skiing was good). As the week moved on, I started to worry about my own trip to Utah on Friday. I was scheduled to go through Paris on my way to Salt Lake, and they were expecting more snow in Paris as the week went on.

I started checking Delta's website for a "weather waiver," which means that you can switch your itinerary without paying a fee. Wednesday night, Delta finally issued a waiver that would cover my trip. I called Delta right away to see if they could get me out on Thursday rather than Friday. My preferred route would have been Zurich to Atlanta and Atlanta to Salt Lake, thus avoiding northern Europe altogether; unfortunately, there wasn't any room on those flights.

I instead took a schedule that had me going from Zurich to Amsterdam to Minneapolis to Salt Lake. It involved a five-hour layover in Minneapolis. Ugh. I would have landed in Salt Lake at about midnight Utah time. I decided that was better than trying to get through Paris on Friday, though. I couldn't get a rental car out of Salt Lake on Thursday, and I didn't want someone to have to pick me up at midnight and then run me back to the airport the next day to get the rental car, so I made a reservation at a hotel near the airport. I figured I could stay there Thurday night and get the car at the airport on Friday.

I frantically packed everything on Wednesday night and got ready for bed. I checked the website one more time before I went to bed, and lo and behold, the Atlanta route had opened up. Suddenly, everything changed again. I spent a long time on the phone trying to get things worked out with the airline. There were some issues with the ticket that I wouldn't be able to work out until I got to the airport in Zurich. I cancelled my hotel in Salt Lake and switched the car reservation again. After all of that, I got to bed at 2:30 a.m. with my alarm set for 5:00. Ugh. This violated Ethan's First Rule of Flying West Across the Atlantic Ocean: "Get a good night's sleep before you go. You'll be sorry if you don't." I knew I'd pay the price on the other side, but that's how it goes.

So, after getting my two and a half hours of sleep, I got up and headed for the airport, unsure of whether I would actually be getting on a plane. I was able to get things worked out with the ticket, but I was pretty fried by the time I got to the airport. As I got on the plane to fly from Zurich to Atlanta, though, I experienced my own little Christmas miracle: the heavens opened, a choir of angels began to sing, and the boarding pass scanner spat out a little piece of paper that said that I'd been upgraded to business class for the ten-hour flight to Atlanta. Never had an upgrade been so welcome.

I got to Atlanta without further trouble and went to the gate for my connecting flight. In a throwback to the way that Stace and I used to fly for free before having kids, the flight was overbooked, and Delta was looking for volunteers to bump to the next flight. I thought at first that I'd have to overnight it at a hotel in Atlanta, which was fine with me at that point, but it turned out that they were able to get me on the next flight just two hours later. That was worth a $400 travel voucher to me and a free dinner at the Atlanta airport. So, the bottom line is that I arrived at the home of Stace's folks about 25 hours after getting two and a half hours of sleep. Needless to say, I was fairly wasted during the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day family gatherings over the next couple of days. I think I'm finally over jet lag today. We'll see.

And they're off!

I put Stace and the kids on a plane to Atlanta this morning, so all is well. Everyone took it in stride, all things considered. We had a nice day of skiing on Saturday. (Mormon reference coming) Tanner got a little more time to figure out how to be a deacon and how to be the deacon's quorum president all at once, so that was good.

On another topic, Lindsey might be picking up more German than I've realized. While we were skiing on Saturday, she was moving past a little girl in the line to get to the tow rope. I saw her say something to the girl. Later, I told Lindsey that the girl probably didn't speak English. Lindsey's respose: "I know, Dad. I was speaking German." When I asked Lindsey what she'd said, she told me that she'd said, "Kann ich gehen?" Translated word for word, that means "Can I go?" That's actually correct. I don't know if that's how you'd actually make that point in German or Swiss German, but it's at least literally correct. Unfortunately for Lindsey, the girl was young enough that she probably only spoke Swiss German and not High German, but still, it was a good attempt.

Well, here we are

Pop quiz: What's the best way to spend your time when you're stuck in Switzerland for a couple of days because there's been so much snow? The answer is obvious, isn't it?

Sometimes, it snows

Well, Stace and the kids were all set to fly to Utah on Saturday, but the snow that hit most of western Europe today has caused a few problems. As it stands now, they're set to fly out on Monday. (I tried to get them into business class on a flight on Sunday, but Delta wouldn't go for it.)

It's all part of the fun of trying to fly over the holidays, I suppose.

Life is random

You know, sometimes strange things happen that just make you shake your head with the realization that you have no idea what's going on.

Today, I got into work and saw a can of something sitting on the table in the kitchenette by my office. It's a little bigger than a tuna fish can. As I examined it more closely, I saw that it had come from Germany. Another minute's inspection showed me that it was a can of lamb meat. And, finally, I learned that it's dog food.

Why is there a German can of lamb meat meant to be fed to a dog sitting in the kitchenette in my office in Switzerland? I have absolutely no idea, but that's the kind of thing that keeps life interesting.

Swiss Christmas

Last night, Tanner went to a school dance and the rest of us went to Zurich to see a show called "Swiss Christmas" (don't ask me why they use an English name for the show). It was pretty cool. Our Swiss friends, the Russi family, had won tickets, so we met up with them in Zurich.

It was a big circus-tent sort of thing set up in a big open area. For the show, they had all kinds of acrobatic acts, including one contortionist who might give me nightmares. She could lie on her belly and bend her spine so that her feet would be hanging in front of her face. Ouch!

The show even had live music with a Swiss twist. This is probably the only time in my life when I'll hear a both a Swiss alphorn and an electric guitar playing at the same time.

(If you don't know what an alphorn is, here's a picture.)

Missive from Lindsey

Today's a Swiss holiday. It's something to do with Mary. (Gotta love living in a Catholic canton.) I was going to take the kids skiing today, but things suddenly warmed up dramatically and it rained, so our bunny hill has turned into more of a dirt hill. We're just having a lazy day around the house.

Lindsey decided to write a paper describing her plans for Christmas. I was going to scan it and post it, but I'm not sure how well the writing would show up. I'll transcribe it instead. See if you can decipher it. If no one can understand it, I'll post a translation in a couple of days.

"My Weekend

"On CRiSmS holday ym leveng To yoTou ym goeng To my. Gramdmas has and See my gramdmas cat."

Everyone got that?

Ski season opener

After a couple of days of snow that affected all of Europe, shutting down airports from London to Geneva, today was a gorgeous day to go skiing. It was cold but sunny, and there was no wind. The kids and I went to our nearby bunny hill to get back into the swing of things. Lindsey is still a bit tentative on the slopes, but Tanner has progressed beyond the bunny hill stage. We'll have to take him somewhere else from now on.

All growed up

Tanner became a deacon today in church. Two minutes later, he became the president of the deacons since he's the only one. That makes a grand total of four young men who regularly attend church meetings in our congregation.

Life's a little different out here from what we're used to in Lakeville. It should be a good experience for him.

Egypt, I guess

Recall that our past two spring breaks here have been spent in Helsinki and Amsterdam. We've decided to do something highly unusual for spring break this year and head south rather than north. We haven't quite finalized the details yet, but it looks like we're going to spend a week and a half or so in Egypt tromping around in the desert, looking at pyramids, and riding camels.

Stace is a little worried about the food, but I've assured her that food in Egypt is exactly the same as food in the United States. Next time you talk to her, tell her that eating in Egypt is just like eating at Olive Garden in Burnsville. If enough of us tell her that, maybe she'll believe it.

How was your holiday?

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. We celebrated the holiday by sending the kids to school. Tanner made the comment that since the school claims to be an "international school," it should recognize the holidays of every country around the world. Nice try, kiddo.

I am loved

Well, at least I know that if everything else turns against me in my life, I'll always have Great Clips. They miss me and want me back.

Another protest

Lindsey's still at it. This time, she got mad at Tanner for something or other. I think he was bragging to her that he can do math better than she does. (Yes, we pointed out to him that you really shouldn't take too much pride as a twelve-year-old in being better at math than a first-grader.)

Anyway, we got another protest sign taped to her bedroom door. I guess she's symbolically erasing Tanner from existence.

Special family memories

Tonight, after we put Lindsey to bed, the remaining three members of the Wood family had a special moment: we were all in the living room together while separately engaged in our various electronic pursuits. Stace was listening to music on her iPod, Tanner was playing games on his iPod Touch, and I was reading the Minneapolis newspaper on my new Kindle (which I love).

Isn't it beautiful when a family can spend some quality time together?

Things are gonna get ugly

I've mentioned before that it costs me about $40 to get a haircut in Switzerland as opposed to about $15 in the States. I try, therefore, to take care of all of my hair-cutting needs on my trips to Minnesota or Utah.

To that end, I got my hair cut literally three hours before I flew out of Minnesota last week. I was trying to push it as far to the end of my time there as I could. I'll next arrive in the U.S. on Friday, December 24. That means that, unless I break down and get my hair cut here in Switzerland, my next real chance for a haircut will be on Monday, December 27, which means I'll be going six weeks and six days between haircuts. I'm afraid I'll look like a werewolf by then. We'll see how this goes. It'll make for some pretty nasty pictures on Christmas morning.

Cast adrift

Here I am, sitting with my laptop in my little corner at Starbucks because they have free wi-fi. Living at the house is a little weird. There's no internet and no TV. It's basically me, a bed, a couple of couches, and a bunch of boxes. I did manage to find one towel, one washcloth, and some dishes.

It's a strange existence. On election night, I had to keep going out to the car radio to see what was going on in the world. I have internet at work here, but after two days of being disconnected at the house this weekend, I had to get back online to take care of some things in Switzerland. The world is different these days. It's all about being connected now, right?

There was a rash of teenagers getting up to talk in church today. They all talked about things going on with their Facebook pages. At this point, I don't see myself ever having a Facebook page. I took a look at Stace's page once, and I just about had a panic attack. So many people! So many things going on! I don't want to be that connected.

I'm a bit of a contradiction: on the one hand, I felt a bit unsettled and out of touch without an internet connection. On the other hand, the thought of having a Facebook page with a zillion "friends" checking in on me all the time is just about enough to give me a seizure. I guess I feel the need to be able to observe the world without having the world observe me.

Well, this is about as disjointed of a post as I've ever written, isn't it? I'm not quite sure what point I'm trying to make. Oh, well. Back to Switzerland on Tuesday.

Yuck

With Jed and company out of the house, I had to mow my own lawn this week. First time in two and a half years. I haven't missed it, and I hope to never mow a lawn again as long as I live. Tanner will be old enough to mow it when we get back.

The voyage home

I forgot to elaborate on my description of our drive home. We had a couple of interesting obstacles.

The first was in Italy. A couple of hours out of Venice, before we'd gotten to Milan, all traffic on the freeway came to a dead stop. We weren't moving at all. That's unusual, so we figured that something was wrong. Sure enough, after a few minutes, a police car and a fire engine came past us on the side of the freeway. All of us were out of our cars and walking around, and at least one guy took the opportunity to relieve himself at the side of the road. (Europeans tend to be less uptight about things like than Americans, and Italians tend to be less uptight than other Europeans.) We finally got moving after 45 minutes, and as we drove past the trouble spot, we could see that it had been a car fire that bascially left just the charred shell of a car. It must have been pretty spectacular at the time. We didn't see any signs that anyone had been hurt, but we're not sure.

The next hangup came as we were approaching the Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland. That's a very long tunnel through the Alps that links the German and Italian parts of Switzerland. When it was built, it was the longest road tunnel in the world. Without that tunnel, you either have to go a couple of hours out of the way, or you have to take one of those scary Swiss mountain passes that's full of hairpin turns and is only open in the summer. I've heard of waits as long as three hours, but it only took us an hour to get through.

So that's how a five-hour drive stretched into something a bit longer.

Last stop: Venice

All good things must come to an end. You can't have unlimited food and free housekeeping forever, right? Everyone was pretty tired when we got back to Venice, but we decided to stay there for an extra day because we knew we'd probably never get back there again. It was bit touristy for my liking, but it was good to walk around and see how things worked. And, to reiterate what I said before, if you take a bus or a taxi, that means you're getting on a boat.

Lindsey got herself a mask that she loved.



Here's a parking lot in Venice:



With the ocean levels rising, Venice is flooding more and more often. This happens predictably according to the tides, so there are raised sidewalks to get people over the floods when necessary.





Here's the famous Rialto Bridge, which crosses the Grand Canal in the heart of Venice:



Here's a shot from the bridge. (I don't know why Lindsey looks like her dog just died. I think she was just tired.)



I wept openly that evening as I saw our cruise ship, the Spendour of the Seas, leaving Venice without me on board.



Here's a shot of St. Mark's Square, which is where the action is in Venice. Our hotel was just north of the Square. At night, different musical ensembles were playing at the different cafes, so we just wandered from one to the next to listen to the music. They were all very good musicians. It was pretty cool.

.

And, of course, no European city can be considered truly great without this landmark:

.

One parting shot:

.

So that's the trip. We don't know what's coming next. We know that we need to hit London, and we also need to hit Disneyland Paris again (ugh), but beyond that, we're not sure when we're doing anything. Time to start planning the next trip. In the meantime, I'm headed to Minnesota on Monday, so I won't have much to say for a while.

Greece, part 2

Our last stop was another island, this one containing the town of Corfu. It was also Tanner's birthday. We took a tour of the island that included, as usual, tons of gorgeous scenery, including a stop at a beach.

After our bus got back to the ship, Tanner and I stayed in town for a while to have a real Greek dinner to celebrate his birthday. I had kumquat chicken and Tanner and seafood penne. Pretty darn good.

Here are some pictures. Those of you who know Tanner will recognize, in the second picture, the unique pose that means that Tanner is enjoying himself.

Greece, part 1

The first of our two days in Greece found us on the island of Santorini. I'm not sure who decided that it would be a good idea to build a town at the top of a steep cliff that drops off into the ocean, but that's what they did. It was very scenic. We didn't take any organized tours or anything. The kids stayed on the boat while Stace and I went into town.

After a while, Stace and I split up so that she could shop and I couldn't. See the switchbacks on the left side of the first picture? There are three ways to get down the cliff: take a cable car, ride a donkey, or walk. When we split up, Stace left me with firm instructions that I was not to walk down the cliff. So, you can probably guess how I got down the cliff. We were far enough into the cruise that the Wood family finances were looking a bit grim, so I made the necessary sacrifice of saving us four euros by walking. She has yet to verbally thank me for my sacrifice, but I can see the gratitude in her eyes.

And now, an intermission

Before we get to pictures from Greece, let's throw in some pictures of life on the cruise ship. (The first picture, though, is just a random picture of the Swiss sunset from our terrace a few weeks ago. If I don't throw it in now, I'll forget about it. This is one of the things I'll miss the most when we leave.)

Ephesus

It's not really clear to me what divides Asia from Europe, but whatever it is, we were in the part of Turkey that's in Asia. (Always good to check off another entry on the list of things to do before I die. Now I just need to hit Africa, Australia, and Antarctica to visit all of the continents.)

Our tour that day consisted of two parts: a visit to the so-called House of the Virgin Mary and the ruins of Ephesus. (There was a third part in which Stace almost bought an $800 Turkish rug, but let's ignore that. Quote from Stace: "I looked interested, and suddenly I was alone in a room with four of them trying to sell me a rug!") In the end, Mary's house was kind of underwhelming. I think Mary was unhappy with us because it rained like crazy while we were there. Also, there's no concrete evidence that Mary ever lived there. Legend has it that John took her there sometime after the death of Jesus, but it's more a matter of faith than of science. One thing that was interesting is that the site has a Catholic version of Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. People scribble their wishes on tissues or scraps of paper and leave them tucked in the wall.

Then it was on to Ephesus. In some ways, Ephesus was even more cool than Pompeii, but it doesn't get the same publicity. I guess Ephesus doesn't have the same PR firm. Maybe it's the lack of a backstory involving a volcano, or maybe it's that Ephesus is a little more out of the way than Pompeii.

.

Anyway, it was very interesting. I'll just throw in a few pictures.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Dubrovnik

After we left Venice, our first stop was in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It was interesting to be at the scene of a war that took place while I was in law school rather than taking place way back in history that I can't remember, like World War II. Our tour guide lived in Dubrovnik during the war. She was about eleven when it was going on, and she had stories about knowing which kind of bomb was falling on the city based on how it sounded. The kids would run out and play in between the rounds of shelling.

We first took a cable car above the city, which gave us a nice view. You can see some of that, along with a damaged fort that still hasn't been repaired from the war.

We then went back down to the old town. That part of Dubrovnik is mostly just for tourists now, but it was interesting. Lindsey found a few new friends. She also spent some time filling in for the tour guide.

.

.

.

.

.

.

All told, we found Dubrovnik to be a very nice place. I've mentioned before how hard it is for me to imagine Germany and France at war, even though World War II took place seventy years ago. It's equally hard to imagine a war right in the middle of Europe just fifteen years ago, but that's what was going on when Yugoslavia dissolved.