Saturday, June 20, 2009

Did we fall off the edge?

No. Not we didn't go off the edge of the Earth. Just to the other side.

We spent a day, and part of the night, saying goodbye to our friends. We packed up our house, loaded our bags...
... and in the middle of the night, we walked out the gate. Saying goodbye to our Cairo home of 4+ years.
We spent some boring time in airports...
... and some silly time.
How silly? Check out Honor's amateur rock video...

yea... that silly. Well, we thought it was funny.. maybe you had to be there, bored and over-tired?

Anyway. Honor's kitty (as well as family members and other plush animals) had their photos taken multiple times - due to limited subject material and the boredom of a 6yo photographer.
We are also the proud owner of multiple airport photos as well.
Gotta love digital cameras! For travel entertainment, we find that handheld games are good, but the kids can also keep entertained with the camera, my Palm Treo (PDA with drawing and game apps), as well as with good ol' fashioned pencils, crayons and paper. A blank notebook ususally gets more use than any coloring book.We had a bit of a delay in Frankfurt, but never ran out of things to do.

Finally we loaded up for our final leg of the trip.
Kitty and Honor got comfortable too.
Kids, of course, nabbed the window seats.
and off we went.
Thank you daddy for the upgraded tickets. Seats were so comfy that I actually slept on the plane... I've never slept on a plane! But I snoozed through most of both flights. Honor, my seat partner, slept less than I did, but showed how mature she has become by keeping herself entertained and by interacting politely with the attendants on her own. Brian and Brad were on the other side of the plane and had a comfy flight too. Amazing how fast a 5+ hour flight, followed by a 9+ hour flight, goes by when you sleep through most of it. Yay! And the rest/comfort really helped us handle the landing and all that fun stuff, processing the rental car, driving to our destination, and getting up too early the next morning for work.
We arrived in the US with rain clouds... and rain! How refreshing!!
We landed among trees and amazing green-ness. It's taking some getting used to. The kids are begging to have their very own, first ever, umbrellas. Honor says the air is 'heavy' .. good description of the humidity. We've enjoyed finding rabbits, deer, squirrels, groundhogs, birds, fish, etc. The kids even found a bird sitting in a nest the other day. A lot of the local wildlife have been granted names as well... wonder what they think about that?
Our temporary home is very comfortable and perhaps later I'll do a review of the company we are renting from - Marriott Execustay - after I have a bit more time to fill out my impression of the service. So far, very good.
and so now, we are off on our new adventure...
We have appointments, admin stuff, etc, to keep us very busy the next few weeks... and as we do not have all that much for the kids to do here inside the apartment, I rarely get to use my own laptop(!), but, I promise, when I am able to pry it away from little fingers, I will try to not only keep up posting about what we are doing now, but fill in with some flashback posts on the fun stuff we did before we left Cairo.

Missed ya!