On our way to Europe

Well, we're sitting in the airport in San Antonio as I write this.  We went straight from our hotel (good breakfast there, by the way - they actually cooked the eggs and hash browns right there in front of us!) to John Fardal's house.  He went with us to the airport and when we saw that we were set to go with luggage and stuff, he drove our car back to his house where it's going to stay.  So, we got past checking-in just fine.  My suitcase was 2 pounds overweight but the guy let it slide.  Guillermo's was exactly 50 pounds and the box with Andrew's voltage transformer was only 39 pounds.  So, we cleared that ok.  Whew!!  One concern down, and one more to go.  Now the question is, will they take any of our carry-ons away from us as we're getting on the plane.

Our wait for the flight was 2 hours and when it was time to get on, no one looked at our carry-ons so we got past the last concern we had.  It was a good flight to Minneapolis.  Minneapolis looked so nice from the air - the trees were turning colors and all the neighborhoods looked so clean and pretty.  From the air, it looked like Minneapolis would be a wonderful place to live.  We didn't have much of a wait at all in Minneapolis and then we were on our way to our next stop, an airport in Paris.  The flight was quite bumpy and very very long.  Once in Paris, we had an incredible wait to be processed through customs.  Under ordinary circumstances, it wouldn't have been all that bad, but we were tired and things just seem to be more annoying when you're tired.

Finally getting through customs, we had a really hard time finding how to get to our next terminal.  Of course, it never is easy.  Terminal G through these doors!  Ok, so we go through the doors and it takes us outside and no sign of a Terminal G anywhere in sight or even if we could see where Terminal G was, it didn't look like there was any easy way to get there.  We finally learned that a bus comes by periodically to pick up people to take them to the terminal.  When we got to Terminal G, there was no indication of which gate to go to for our flight so we went through the boarding area, hoping we were doing the right thing.  Even when we got through that, there STILL was no indication anywhere of what gate we needed to go to.  Eventually we learned that gate numbers aren't posted until 30 minutes before departure.

The flight to Basel was quick and easy.  Andrew and Martina met us at the exit and it was so exciting to see them again!  It is so hard to believe that we are finally with them!  They drove us to their apartment where we rested up a little, then walked to the nearby grocery store to pick up a few things.  For dinner Andrew fixed a delicious Spaghetti Bolognese which we had with some good wine.  It was the perfect relaxing ending to a tiring day.  Some pictures of the nice evening with them.

Andrew fixing the Spaghetti Bolognese

Serving the spaghetti

Martina getting the table ready

Andrew taking this picture

Guillermo taking this picture