Story First, Pictures Later

Well, since it's been almost another month since the last blog entry, I feel you are all entitled to a short story of how we've spent the last month. For two full weeks, we were on the road. We visited Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Düsseldorf. That's France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Belgium and the Netherlands were firsts for both me and Geo. It was my fourth visit to Paris and the longest (a whole week). We did lots of things that we never had a chance to do before, because our normal style of travelling is to just blast through a city. I finally got into the Louvre, which is amazing for so many reasons. And we got to stay with relatives of a friend from home, which really gave us a taste of superb French hospitality. We did a lot of wandering along the beaten tracks, but almost everything we saw was new to us, or at least a new angle of something we've seen before. And I thought I didn't much care for Paris before, but it turns out I didn't care for rushing through Paris. We had a wonderful, RELAXING visit, getting a chance to catch up with Sara and Emrys in person, and a week with George, who really got to perfect his French on this trip! It was really a nice way to see Paris this time, and I'm glad we got all the experience we did!
After we dropped George off at the airport, we picked up our cute brand new Ford Focus. It had 14 km on it when we put on our seatbelts. Wow! It smelled nice and new, and since it was a free upgrade, we were happy. Sixt is such an easy company to work with renting cars. It was a completely hassle-free experience! We got on the easy-to-navigate French highways, and our first stop was just outside of the airport for a huge Michelin map and a picnic lunch from a gas station. But it was all gourmet food at this gas station. We had fresh salads, tomatoes, wraps, chips, and chocolate ladyfingers, and green tea. Yummy. It did cost more than a fast-food lunch, but we didn't have to give in and eat completely junky food of the normal convenience store type. And then we were off for Brussels. We made sure to get a reservation for a place with a/c there, since it had been really hot in Paris and we didn't have a/c our last 3 nights. We were in a great hotel, so we had a good base for touring the city and watching the World Cup. We were there both nights of the quarter finals. That was fun. But it was a challenge to find a great place to watch the game, so one night we watched most of it in our room. The second night, it wasn't on any TV stations we had, so we had to go out and the first place we found was pretty dumpy, but the people were friendly, so that made it better. The TVs were mounted high in the corners near the ceiling. Ouch for the necks! At least we had a few days off until the next games. In Amsterdam, we arrived at 3 pm so we did the most logical thing we could think off: Mike's Bike Tours. We knew they had a gig in Amsterdam from our first experience in Munich with them 8 years ago. So, we made it at 4 pm to the meeting place and had a fun tour of the city. That was 5 1/2 hours, which meant we just had to eat dinner and then go to bed. We slept in the next morning and went back to explore a little bit before hitting the road for Germany. The drive to Düsseldorf took about 2 1/2 hours (I drove the whole way, scary for me! The car was a diesel and a stick...good grief!) and we were so relieved to arrive safely at Sabrina's flat there. We had a nice visit with Sabrina again, but this time we were completely focused on the World Cup. That means two games in 3 days. I won't get into my opinions of the games here, but Geo is going to write something about it for the next Das Tor (the school newspaper).
After the final game, we went to bed, since we had to get up early and drive back to Paris the next day. That only took about 4 hours, which was good, since I accidently told Geo the wrong departure time (oops, I read the arrival time instead). We had budgeted plenty of time for getting to the airport, but we could have spent it somewhere else instead of trying to check in for our flight. So the disaster was averted. Whew!
Well, now you know how we spent the last 2 weeks. Keep your eyes open for some pictures!