5-28-10 Friday
Arrival in Europe. We could see on the airplane it showed where we were and where we were flying to. We could see we were flying over the English Channel and then into Belgium. We made it to Brussels in one piece. We had almost a 2 ½ hour lay-over in Brussels. Brad wanted to borrower the camera I had got, so I let him, but told him to keep track of it and take good care of it. Of course he left it on the plane when we arrived in Geneva, so we lost 1 camera. Also somehow we lost the DVD case that had most of our DVD’s in it. Not sure who’s fault that was, but it must have been left on a plane, or else I just haven’t found it yet. I’m pretty sure it’s gone. When we arrived in Geneva, we picked up our bags that had been checked through, as well as my bike bag. We were leasing a van from Renault and were supposed to call them when we arrived to make arrangements where we supposed to meet them. They were supposed to have a shuttle at the airport to take us to our car. I had bought SIM cards for mine and Kindra’s phones for Europe, but I couldn’t get it to work. Also when I tried a land line, I couldn’t get that to work either. Finally after asking a couple people I found out that we had to travel a couple hundred meters across the airport to the “French” side, and then the land lines worked. They came and picked us up in a shuttle and took us to our car. I was going to drop my bike bag off in Lausanne, Switzerland with the people who’s chalet we are staying at our last 2 weeks, and they were going to drop it off at the chalet so it would be there when we finished our trip. Unfortunately I couldn’t get in touch with them as I still couldn’t get my cell phone to work, so we didn’t drop the bike bag off. We can take it with us, and when we get to each new place we are staying, we can take it out of the car, but that’s just a pain and takes up space in the van the days we are traveling between places we are staying. We managed to make it to the outskirts of Bern where we were staying the night, despite my almost dozing off a half a dozen times. I felt like I was about to end up like Chevy Chase in the movie where he fell asleep in the car on their vacation and they ended up bounding across fields. Actually I feel a little bit like we are the Grizwalds on our European Vacation. Everyone but me was fast asleep in the car by the time we made it to where we were staying and I got them into beds before I crashed for the night.