Halloween

The Swiss don't really do Halloween, but we managed to celebrate with some Americans. Here are pictures of our costumes. (I couldn't find a costume, so I decided to just open my shirt a little and go with what God gave me.)

In the air again

Well, after three months of being sick of airplanes, I'm ready to climb back on board again. I'm heading to the Twin Cities in the middle of November. I'll get back to Switzerland just in time for Stace to head to Utah for a couple of weeks. I wanted to get one more trip in before the end of the year, and why visit Minnesota in December if one doesn't have to?

More thoughts

A couple more things to add about the cruise.

First, just to illustrate the outrageous cost of living around here, I'll tell you that I got a haircut on the cruise for less than I could have gotten it in Switzerland. When's the last time you heard of someone getting something cheaper on a cruise ship than they could have gotten it on the land?

Second, Tanner turned eleven during the cruise. That's the day we were in Rome. Not a bad way to spend your birthday, right? We ordered a cake to be brought out to him during dinner that night. The staff sang to him. He thought the whole thing was pretty cool.

The report

Okay, here we go with the report.

Last Saturday, we drove from Zug to Barcelona, which took about eleven hours with breaks. It was a nice drive. That part of France was much prettier than what we saw on our way to Paris last winter.

While in the French part of Switzerland, I got a reminder of just how good people are at switching between languages over here. We stopped for gas shortly before we got to Geneva. There were a couple of people in line before me, and the attendant spoke French to them. When it was my turn, I told her my pump number in German and looked at her quizzically, unsure if she's be able to understand. Without batting an eye, she shifted into flawless German and completed the transaction.

The trip through France and into Spain was uneventful, which is what you want on a long drive. Barcelona was a nice city. It seemed more laid back than Switzerland (but then most places are more laid back than Switzerland). We took our best shot at going to church on Sunday morning, but we couldn't find the church. It was located somewhere in the inner city of Barcelona and probably didn't even look like what we would consider to be a church building. Anyway, we drove around the area for a while and then gave up. I'm sure we'll get credit in heaven for trying.

Then it was time to take a cab to the port, and the fun began. We got on the ship around 1:00 and immediately commenced eating. The kids, of course, were deliriously happy figuring out all the details of our cabin, the play areas, the mini-golf, the rollerblading track, the ice rink, the dining rooms, and all the rest that comes with cruising on a big ship.

Monday was a day at sea. The kids went to the kids' club and the parents just chilled. Lindsey loved the kids' club. In this picture (which has horrible red-eye that I'm too lazy to remove but seems appropriate for an owl), Lindsey has been painted up as an owl. She went around the ship hooting at everyone she saw. Later that week, the club had an activity where all the little kids went into the elevator, pushed the button for each floor, and then yelled "wock and woll" (as Lindsey puts it) every time the doors opened. Lindsey reported that "a lady looked at us funny."

Another fun thing about the ship was that we had a different animal made out of towels every night in the room when we came back from dinner.

Things were a little rough at sea that day. The ship was rocking and rolling pretty good. So, imagine Ethan facing the triple threat: naturally unsteady legs, on a ship that's rocking on the waves, running on a treadmill. But at least I didn't also have to do an ice show on a rolling ship like the professional skaters did.

Our first stop, Tuesday, was Naples, Italy. We had nothing booked for the morning, so I just walked around Naples. It was a dramatic contrast with Switzerland. In Naples, there was gridlock at 10:30 in the morning, cars were honking at each other all the time, cars were triple-parked everywhere, and "no parking" signs seemed to be taken as suggestions to ignore. It felt like New York City to me. Crazy.

That afternoon, we all went to visit the ruins of Pompeii, the city buried by the eruption of the volcano at Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 72. The city was forgotten until the 1700s, when it was accidentally rediscovered. It's one of the best-preserved ruins in the world. No one has exact numbers, but by one estimate, 9,000 people died after the eruption, mostly due to asphyxiation.

Wednesday was Rome. Rather than taking one of the cruise line's tours, we joined with the family of my co-worker, Bob, and paid for a van and a driver to take us around Rome. It didn't take long to figure out that you can't really do justice to Rome in a day. You should really spend a couple of days at the Vatican alone, whereas we had about two and a half hours to see the Vatican Museum, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica. We saw the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Roman Forum in the morning.

After that, we visited the Trevi Fountain. Legend has it that if you throw a coin into the fountain, you're assured another visit to Rome someday. (I'm not sure that anyone has subjected that statement to the rigors of scientific study.)

That afternoon, we ate lunch at a real Italian restaurant (meaning that we were the only Americans in the place, which is exactly the way I like it) and then went to the Vatican. As I mentioned, the Vatican deserves much more time than we had for it. We'll need to go back to Rome again without a cruise, just like we need to go back to Paris after our one-day excursion earlier this year. The Sistine Chapel was really neat but really crowded.

Here's the ceiling of one part of the Vatican Museum, video by Tanner:

And here's a picture of Tanner with Luigi, our driver for the day in Rome.

Thursday was Pisa. We spent a couple of hours in Pisa, and it turns out that you can adequately cover Pisa in a couple of hours. There's not much there besides the tower and a lot of really aggressive street vendors selling incredibly inexpensive Rolex watches (and I use "incredible" in the original sense of the word). Sure enough, there's a tower there, and sure enough, it's leaning. Beyond that, there's not much to recommend in Pisa.

By Friday, the kids had about had it with tours. We didn't schedule anything. We were in a port near Nice and Cannes, but we left the kids on the ship, and Stace and I just did some walking around the town of Villefranche. The kids had fun doing some skating. I fell my first time around the rink and scraped some skin off of my palm. That was the end of my skating.

Here's Tanner golfing on the ship with France in the background.

Here's our ship from the land.

Our last stop on Saturday was supposed to be in Marseilles, but the wind was so ferocious that we had to divert to the nearby port of Toulon. I then took a bus to Marseilles and still saw some of the city while everyone else relaxed on the boat.

Then on Sunday, we survived the drive back home. Whew!

A couple of observations: First, of all the places I've been in Europe so far, Switzerland is probably the best place to live. It's orderly, it's clean, and it's a good place for kids. France might be nice. Italy seemed crazy. I'm sure that Italians love it, but Rome and Naples were a bit chaotic for my taste.

Second, it seems to me that everyone should be able to live on a cruise ship all the time. If I ever run for office, that's going to be the first point in my party's platform.

We're back

We survived. I'm too pooped to put much on here now, but here's the list of the countries we visited in the past week either by boat or by car: Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy, France, Spain, France, and Switzerland. We saw the ruins at Pompeii, the Vatican and many other sites in Rome, and the leaning tower of Pisa. We ate too much.

Pictures are coming soon.

Here we go

Well, we're off in the morning. We've got a ten-hour drive ahead of us tomorrow. I fully expect that a wellspring of sympathy will fail to erupt in the hearts of my readers.

The U.S. dollar hit a symbolic low again today: my bank's daily withdrawal limit of 510 U.S. dollars limited me to 510 Swiss francs at the ATM today. That means the dollar and the franc are almost even. That fact makes the six francs I spent today for lunch (since I forgot to bring it from home) a little more painful. I can't rationalize it by saying that the exchange rate makes up for it. Earlier this year, the dollar was so good that my withdrawal limit allowed me to get 630 Swiss francs. My company makes up the difference, so it doesn't hurt me financially, but it does make it harder to rationalize nonessential purchases in Switzerland (or in the rest of Europe when one is on a cruise, for that matter).

See you next week! There'll be pictures.

Post #2 for today

Odds and ends.

First, I just wanted to pass along that our driver/guide for our day in Rome next week is named Luigi. If you can't trust a guy named Luigi to show you around Rome, who can you trust? (I think for an additional fee, he can also help you out if you're having trouble with someone . . . .)

Second, here's a picture of a rainbow that I tried to get on film. I was standing on our terrace. It didn't show up really well, but here it is:





Third, send the kids out of the room, but I just can't resist passing along my favorite headline for the month: "Man misses birth of his child after fondling nurse, police say." Sometimes I'm just so proud of my gender.