Travel Day

airport shuttle

European kids carry their own (featherweight) backpacks.  At least that's what we told them.

checked 5 bags and carried on 6 (including 2 instruments)

Daphne calls these the super long treadmills

Best airport/layover toy, by the way - small Nerf ball.  There's often space (don't need much) where the kids can play catch or kick it around and get the wiggles out while only providing mild irritation to the other waiting passengers.  An occasional Nerf bonk never hurt anyone, right?

Another travel-tactic that Pete has passed along to us from his business travel days (and first referenced here) - pretend you are a cow.  Follow the herd.  Don't ask questions.  Only moo.  "Why are we stopping here?" "How much longer is this line going to be?" "Why is this taking so long?"- these are not questions a cow would ask.  A cow would just go with the flow and moo.  I have to say, it works (even for adults - just turn off the non-cow part of the brain for awhile and you're a lot more content with life!)

Anyway, we usually don't check any bags when traveling (as one of Pete's uncles says - there are only two kinds of bags: carried-on and lost), but all our bags made it to Luxembourg safely.  Which is very good, because it's all we own for the next couple weeks.

After picking up our rental car and dropping off our bags at our temporary furnished apartment (which is of course much nicer than our actual apartment will be), we set straight off with our relocation agent to register at our commune (sounds a bit biblical/communist , eh?) and enroll the kids in school.  Between very little sleep the last week or so, and almost none for any of us on the plane, we were really hurting.  I'll spare you the details, but picture 4 hours at hot and humid DMV-esque facility on no sleep when you brought nothing for an exhausted 4 and 6 year old to do.  If Luxembourg wanted to test to see if our family would remain intact and not kill each other, we just barely passed.  Too tired to even moo.  We were pretty much ground beef by then.

But we're here, we made it, we're alive, and all is well.

Moien from Luxembourg!