I often joke with a lot of my friends that every few years you should completely reinvent yourself – or in my case, every few months. You see, I’ve never been accused of being someone that has a very long attention span or a good sense of focus. I’m always chasing after the next new shiny thing or skipping along from hobby to hobby, idea to idea, without much thought to the impact it has on the rest of my life. Undiagnosed (or at least untreated) ADHD? Yeah, probably, but I think it’s probably also a trait I developed while growing up. Moving every 2-6 years and getting to start over with a new batch of friends, new hobbies, and a chance to form a new identity is something I’ve always been pretty good at. Even once we moved to Louisville and I started high school, I still found myself repeating the same pattern of making some wholesale change of friends and interests every few years. My best and oldest friends are the ones who manage to slip through this housecleaning and are usually the ones who are the most tolerant of whatever hairbrained idea I have now and who I plan on being this year/month/week.

So why is this worth mentioning? And what on earth does it have to do with two grainy pictures of cars tightly crammed in our garage?

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This is a test post from my new iPhone. Stay tuned for a more complete post about our recent move back to the USA.

On Good Friday, Laura and I woke up early to head to the airport in Düsseldorf to welcome her parents, Barney and Donna, for their week long visit to Europe.  I’d been sick for the week leading up to their arrival (*very* bad stomach bug) and was a little unsure about whether I’d be able to do much traveling with them once they arrived.  I hadn’t eaten solid food for 4 days at this point, so I was incredibly relieved to find that I could join everyone else in enjoying a great dinner out on Friday evening.  Saturday morning we woke up and headed out to Cologne/Köln, to check out the cathedral, have a nice lunch, do a little shopping, and enjoy a walk along the river Rhein before catching the train back to Düsseldorf.

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Waaay back in September – Sep 19-21 to be exact – Laura and I left work early on a Friday afternoon to take a train into Switzerland.  A friend of ours from college, Justin, had been living in Neuchatel, Switzerland as part of a temporary work assignment and invited us to join him for some exploring and traveling in the Swiss Alps.  Justin had a rental car, and we had were able to find reasonable hotel rates, so we were pretty excited about the opportunity.

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After a few stressful weeks at work and some weekends of bad weather and bad luck (including my bike getting stolen) in Düsseldorf, Laura and I were ready to do some traveling again.  We spent the last weekend (Aug 8-10) in Paris and had a wonderful time.  The weekend began early on Friday morning, with our flight out of Düsseldorf boarding at 5:50am.  A brief 50 minute flight had us on the ground at Paris-Orly Airport.  From there we caught a bus to the Hotel des Invalides area and walked the remaining block to what was supposed to have been our hotel… more on that in a bit.  We dropped off our bags because it was too early to check into our room, and after declining the offer of upgrading our room (at a cost of 20€ per night), we hopped on the Metro and headed off to start our sightseeing at the Louvre.

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We picked up our rental car Friday night, as well as a new bike rack, and by 10am on Saturday morning, were on our way to The Netherlands. Düsseldorf is approximately 91 km from the Germany/Netherlands border and a trip to Amsterdam – the first stop of the weekend – is less than two and a half hours away. We arrived in Amsterdam and after a stressful hour long battle through traffic and confusing streets, finally got the car parked in a garage that would accept credit cards. Oh, and we also discovered that the bike rack makes the car/rack/bikes combo a little too tall for the garage entrance… the hard way. Thankfully the only casualty was the bell flying off one of our bikes.

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I've spent the past few weeks since arriving here in Germany playing with my new favorite toy – my Nikon D40 DSLR camera.  It's been almost ten years since I played with a camera with more than a push-button point-and-shoot mode.  The advent of cheap consumer level cameras with the types of advance features and quality optics previously seen only in professional cameras has made it a *much* more accessible hobby.  I picked up my camera, a decent 18-55mm kit lens, and flash card for under $500 and there's been no turning back.  I spent the first week or so just getting used to the controls of the camera, occassionally dabbling in some of the program modes, but mainly shooting in Auto mode.  Boy was I selling that camera short.

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Well, I finally started work this week after a full month (actually 5 weeks) of waiting for my work permit to be approved by the Düsseldorf City office.  I'm working as an 'environmental manager' at the Corporate Center.  I really had no idea what all that entailed until showing up for work on Thursday.  I'm still not 100% sure what my position's expectations (KPI's or 'Deliverables', if you want to get buzz-wordy) are at this point, but at least I know some of the things I'll be working on.

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Laura and I took a trip to Köln (Cologne), Germany on Saturday since the weather was nice and we had some free time. Köln is about 30 minutes south of Düsseldorf along the Rhine River.  We purchased a Schönes Wochenende (Nice Weekend) train ticket, which would allow us to travel to any other town within the North Rhein-Westphalia region and to also use their city transit system once there. 

It turns out, the ticket we purchased wasn’t elligible to use on the type of train we boarded (an ICE hi-speed bullet train) and we had no seats for the short ride.  We’re lucky it was the next station along the line, or they might have booted us off.  Lesson learned.  Once we arrived…

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Well, we’re here now – have been for right at 2 weeks now – and we’re finally settled in, so I thought I’d catch everyone up.  Obviously, the last 15 days have been pretty crazy, starting with the the 7 of our 8 checked pieces of luggage *not* making it on the plane from Louisville to Atlanta. Thankfully the 8th item was Molly in her crate, and from our view out the plane window, we were able to see her loaded up the ramp before take off.  We did our best to relax the rest of the flight over, knowing that even if our luggage wasn’t in Dusseldorf when we arrived, that at least we had the clothes in our carry-on and we had Molly.

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