~ October 28, 2013 ~

Tomorrow, we will have hit the two month mark and it is really so surreal!  I have trouble remembering all the activities that used to consume my days.  I really do.  This new world is peaceful and fun and different each time I walk out the door. 

The past two weeks were so great (hence, no blog posts!) because we had some visitors!  We all visited a few favorite & as well as some new places.  Our very close friends from our neighborhood in Tahoe spent about 4 days with us here in Amsterdam & then went off to Paris where we met them a few days later.  Another family of our closest friends is living in Paris so we hooked up with them & spent four days with them as well.  The kids could not have been more excited to see some new surroundings but also to spend some silly time with their best buddies from home. 

Some highlights included the wonderful meals at Diana & Margaret's apartment, the magnificent Eiffel Tower at night, the view from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, some great restaurants & a canal boat tour along the Siene at night.   After we extended our stay in Paris for one extra night, we said au revoir to our friends & the four of us moved on to Belgium where we made a quick pit stop in Gent & then spent two nights in a cute rented apartment just outside of Brugge.  We walked into town & climbed the highest tower, bought Bryan some hip Euro-wear, ate a lot of delicious items and took a whole lot of pictures.

It was a couple weeks full of giggles, rain, wine, sights, walking, photos, pigeons, mueums, raclette, languages, fries, churches, monuments, parks, chocolate, canal boats, tall towers, frogs legs, fondue, gelato, shopping, gypsy fights, bus crashes, Mona Lisa sightings, 1 love lock on the love lock bridge & more...  Check out the photo album & the comments on each photo to get a bit of the story.  Loading up the photos from my phone revealed to me that I have taken more than 1750 photos since we got here...just on my phone.  On the camera were a few hundred more.  One thing I learned was that when you do some fun filters & edits with the iOS7 on the iPhone, then transfer the photo to your laptop, the creative edits are gone.  Alas, this will take me a while to decide, edit & upload all our favorite photos...  the only other bummer is that I don't have a picture of the gypsy fight which happened to be the absolute highlight of Bryan's trip to Paris.  (Bryan *should* be posting soon on the Dad Blog page about this & also showing his "our-tour-bus-crashed-into-a-taxi" photo.  Funny, he doesn't love museums -- this is what Europe is all about for him... )