5-26-10 Wednesday
Last minute preparations. For those that don’t know me and my entire family terribly well, I’ll start off like some novels and introduce the characters. My name is Adam Catmull, I’m 41 years old, and I’ve decided to take my family of 8 to Europe this year for the summer. My wife, Kindra, and I have been married now for almost 19 years. I can’t believe it. I always viewed middle age guys who had kids who were 16+ as old, but I certainly don’t feel old yet. Anyway back to my wife. I love her to pieces, but she isn’t always the most organized person. That means the planning, preparation, and execution of a trip like this falls almost entirely on me. My oldest daughter, Brecken is 16 ½ and is very excited about our trip, as are the 4 oldest kids. The two youngest I don’t think really understand what all’s going on. Bradley is 14 ½ and has been a bit of a challenge the last couple of years. He’s always been a bit of a challenge having ADHD, but this last year or so, he’s really struggled in school. He’s smart, he just doesn’t like to do the homework and we seem to be butting heads a lot lately as I try and get him to do his homework, clean his room, etc.. I’m hoping this trip will do him a world of good and show him there’s a world out there besides video games. I hope the trip will also built up our relationship which I feel has deteriorated over the last couple of years. Megan is 12 1/2, a sweet heart, and really looking forward to the trip. Ashley is 10 and has been working hard around the house to earn money for the trip. I’m not sure what all she plans on spending that money on, but she’s looking forward to it. Ian is 6 and is a little noisy at times for European standards. We’ll have to find a way to keep him from causing a scene everywhere we go by being too noisy. Mitzi is almost 2 ½ and a handful. She isn’t the most mellow of kids and always wants to be doing something. She’ll be a handful at times.
Today I got up early at 5:45am so I could get in a ride before I packed up my bike and got ready. I went on a 2 hour ride with Curt Doman and then when I got back to my office I realized I had locked myself out and had my normal hide-a-key up on my desk that I had used the day before when I had gone on a ride. So I decided to ride home and help pack until people arrived at the office. Kindra still had a long ways to go to pack her and Mitzi. I helped with that, then finally went into work. I had a lot to finish at work, and had to pack up my bike and bike gear. I thought I’d get home early at maybe 5pm to help get the house ready for us to leave, get the bags in the car, and get the house ready for us to leave, but didn’t get out of the office until nearly 8pm. I still had a ton of things that had to be done, and didn’t get most of it finished until almost 1am, and I still had a good couple of house before I’d be ready to go.



Finally at the airport ready to go.
5-27-10 Thursday
Off to Europe. Our Europe trip kicked off with almost no sleep for me. I was up until about 1am cleaning the house, finishing the packing, and getting everything ready to go. Then I was back up about 5am to start getting everything ready to leave. Our plane left at 11:15am, so I wanted to plan on leaving by about 8am to get to the airport by about 8:30am. With so many kids and bags I felt like I had to plan in some cushion in a lot of what I was doing in case of emergencies. We made it to the airport just fine, and got all checked in. Every time we would check in, go through security, etc. a lot of the people would kind of glance up as I hand them 8 passports and kind go “wow”. Several of us, most notably Kindra and Brecken threw a lot of things in at the last minute and we ended up some things in bags I didn’t know, and our carry-ons were more packed than I’d have liked. Kindra’s mom and dad drove in their car out to the airport with us and drove our car home. We made it onto the plane OK, but it was a small plane with only 18 rows and 2 seats on each side of the aisle. We were spread out all over the plane, despite me telling them when we checked in that we’d really like to sit together, especially as we had small kids. Actually it went better than I had hoped to Chicago. Probably because I was up by myself and also because the trip was new, exciting, and there were plenty of distractions at this point. Our plane was a little late leaving SLC, then we detoured a little north to avoid some turbulence, so we arrived in Chicago about 15 minutes later than we were scheduled. By the time we got everyone off, those that needed to went to the bathroom, we checked where our next flight was leaving from, and made it across the airport to our departing gate, it was about 30 minutes before our flight was to leave, and only about 10 minutes before we were supposed to board. Nobody had had virtually anything to eat all day, so we grabbed quick bites at the McDonald’s in the airport and boarded the plane. Luckily we were mostly together for the flight over. Unfortunately our bags were all over the place, and trying to find what you wanted was difficult. I spent a good portion of the time trying to entertain Mitzi, but she seemed want to go between me and Kindra. I tried to start a book I was reading, but I kept starting the same page over and over. I think I dozed off for about an hour. I knew it was going to be a challenge staying awake over the next day or two.