The Return Of Home

It's been a long haul. Remind me never to do that again. Though I'm still suffering from one of the worst colds I can remember that started nearly four weeks ago; though the house here is empty, quiet, and uneventful; though the dogs are bored; and though my two-plus years of university French that I took seventeen years ago mean basically nothing to me now, we're all here, safe and sound, and things can only go up from now on. J'espère.

I figured as much but, yes, the flight over was a killer. I didn't sleep. The four hours spent in the Frankfurt airport waiting for our flight to Geneva destroyed all excitement and interest in the idea that we had arrived on our third and final continent in six weeks and that soon we would be at a place we could call home for a good three years or so. We did our best but in an airport there is only so much fun available to a four-year-old.

Time spent in Denver was easy and amusing. We had our shoes shined and asked total strangers if they, too, were flying to Switzerland. No. Las Vegas.


Hank took the camera for a while for some random shots of D.I.A. boredom.





I'm not a smoker but if I were I think I would take residence in the Frankfurt airport. Never has it looked so cool and so creepy at the same time.


The last five hours were some of the longest hours of my life. And of Hank's. He kept awake and entertained by watching Barbie Diamond Castle. I kept awake by watching smokers enter and exit the Winston Smoking Zone.


It happened, though, and we broke through the Frankfurt fog. An epic forty-five minutes later the end was in sight. And what a sight it was. In sickness and in health we're together again and for a while the mountains we climb will be layered with snow and we'll do it because we want to. I've climbed enough of those other kind of mountains for now; they're not much fun and they're often more painful.