Brief Intermission and Catching Up

No, I haven't finished with the Italian lakes yet.  !!  But the past month has been chock full of other activities as well.  Most of them have distracted from regular blog posting, especially during the past week.

Last week, for instance, my niece, who is a university student, arrived in Switzerland together with one of her long-time friends. 

The girls will be studying French courses for foreigners as offered by the University of Geneva during the summer and will be here with me until early August.  So HWMBO and I drove to Zurich last week to meet the girls after they had had two full days of travel to get here.  Initially, they were scheduled to travel by train/bus from Billings, MT to Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC, where they were to board an flight that would take them to Düsseldorf in Germany, where they were to land early in the morning and then catch a flight to Zurich, which would arrive mid-morning and where we would bundle them into our car for the rest of the journey.  Tentative plans were also to stop briefly in Interlaken on the way back to Lake Geneva, to experience a tiny bit of the Swiss National Yodeling Festival held in Interlaken last weekend.

But even the best-laid plans can be circumvented.  This proved to be the case when the girls' flight from Vancouver to Düsseldorf departed several hours late.  The great thing is that, in this age of instantaneous communication with them and their mothers, we realized that the plane would be late, which would likely mean that the girls would miss their scheduled flight to Zurich and need to take a later one.  This proved to be the case.  Thanks to on-line and other electronic communications, the girls managed to notify us and their mothers - and especially to reassure the latter - that they had arrived safely in Europe, had not been trafficked and still had their passports!  We all managed to connect at Zurich's Kloten Airport, although several hours later than originally scheduled.  As you can see from the photos with this post, we didn't look too alert so it is probably a miracle that we connected at all!

While the later arrival did allow HWMBO and me to sleep in later than our original wake-up time of 5:00 am for the drive to Zurich - which was greatly appreciated - it did mean that the yodeling festival was a casualty of the revised schedule.  Ah well ...!

Once here and fed, the girls expressed a desire to use the period between their arrival and 27 June, when their classes will begin, to travel to Paris in France.  This made sense because this period of several days is the only one that they will have free for visits longer than lightning touch-downs.  Nonetheless, a trip to Paris and especially one undertaken anytime from mid-June to early September is something that requires advance logistic planning.  Train tickets are still possible, although one pays a premium for not booking in advance, so the girls were able to book rail tickets and change money.

But in Paris, lodgings at reasonable cost are always if-fy during the summer without advance reservation.  Exacerbating the situation is that this week Paris is hosting its annual Air Show, which increases the number of out-of-town visitors exponentially.  Unsurprisingly, not one hostel or cheap hotel could be found, even after a travel professional had been enlisted who used all her contacts to find something - anything.  The closest that the girls got to Paris was when they were near the "Café de Paris" restaurant in Geneva when they changed money!  I'm not even sure whether they realized that.

Although somewhat disappointed, the girls resourcefully managed to change their tickets for Paris to Venice instead and to find affordable lodgings in Venice.  They left early Monday morning by train for their Venice adventure.  Since then, we've followed their progress electronically (e-mail and Twitter) and all seems to be well.  We expect them to return late tomorrow night and hope that they'll have had many glorious experiences to share with us and their families.

Before their departure, we had also hosted an informal get-together over the weekend at our apartment with former colleagues, friends and neighbors to introduce the girls to them in the hope that their circle of acquaintances here will be expanded beyond the summer student contingent.  The get-together was a dual purpose occasion because HWMBO will return to the US next week and it was the only time that many would have a chance to see him while he is here.

Yes, it's been busy here.  It will continue to be busy.  But I will finish the Lake District posts by this weekend.  Then I have a real treat in store: some recent photos of Princess Butterfly and her cousins!