We bid a bittersweet farewell to Paris this morning. It was a crazy week certainly, but it was also a lot of fun. We really enjoyed staying in Roissy, and having those extra days did allow us to pack in more fun adventures and generally soak up the ambiance that is Paris. It always strikes me how our reentry to the real world is so jarring: you go from mellow vacation-mode into high hysteria travel-mode so quickly that your head spins, and international travel just adds a whole extra headache to the process. Travel right now is extra bad – so many people are still trying to get back from wherever they were when the volcano erupted that the airports are just that much crazier than usual. We saw that everywhere today. So it goes. On the flight from Paris to Dallas, we had decent seats in the back of the plane, next to each other. Our seats from Dallas to LA are middle seats with Chuck one row ahead of me (extra punishment apparently from the volcano gods). The good news is he doesn’t have to worry about anybody kicking the back of his seat on the flight and I don’t have to worry about the jackass in front of me putting their seat back for the entire flight (this happened for the ENTIRE ten hour flight from Paris to both of us – a mother and daughter were the offenders. Grrrrr. I have a theory that they need to fix the economy seats in upright positions only – no reclining. Don’t like it? Don’t fly!).

We have decided for our next trip to go to Tahiti – just the two of us – for our tenth anniversary. But here’s a weird fact to ponder: Chuck has a funky track record. Of the five times he’s been to Europe, two times involved extraordinary events. He was in Paris on 9/11, and again was overseas when the volcano erupted. 2012, which will be our tenth anniversary is also the year the Mayan purportedly claims the world will end. I’m just saying.

I’m typing this coda to our European volcanic tour on the plane from Dallas to LA, using the GoGo wifi service. It’s $12.95 for the duration of the flight – not cheap but what the hell, it’s pretty fun and it’s the end of the trip.

So here’s to our 13 day trip to Europe that turned into 19 days.

Until yesterday when the planes started flying again, we were starting to seriously look at Plan C or even Plan D. I checked out one-way fares on Air France: economy started at 2,881 dollars per person (I’d type a dollar sign if I could find it on this keyboard – more on that later)! Plan D involved ocean liners. Luckily it didn’t come to that.

We have had time to contemplate, from our point of view as worried travelers, what we think was handled well by the powers that be (airlines, assorted governments, etc) and what wasn’t. It’s almost too easy to say nothing was handled well, but from where we stood, that’s what it felt like. Regular folks -  our friends back home, Meagan and Jock in the UK – were our true angels, offering us advice, support, and a place to stay if we needed it. American Airlines, the airline we flew, was abysmally silent. I would never recommend them to anyone. We had to take charge of our rebooking, and there hasn’t been a single follow-up email, text or phone call to let us know that our new flight is happening. This would have been such a drop-dead easy customer service coup. What they could have said was: we’re here, and we will help you get home as fast as we can – and if that means booking you on another airline, then that’s what we’ll do. How about daily emails or texts to keep us informed on what’s happening – that would have been nice (and incredibly easy)? The federal government, rather than just post a list of phone numbers for different airlines (oh great, I’m overseas, paying 99 cents a minute per call and I’m going to call American or whoever and be on hold for 10 minutes – I’m being conservative, one time it was longer), might have jumped in with useful tips, collected from, say, the Twitterverse, to help stranded travelers access assistance and open up conversations via social media (as an aside, Heathrow Airport is now following Chuck on Twitter which might alarmingly mean that they are getting some of their CDG info from HIM!). What about free cell phones for folks who didn’t bring one with them and are suddenly stuck with no good way to communicate with folks back home? These are just a few of the ideas we came up with brainstorming last night.

From a work standpoint, both Chuck and I are true converts to the cloud. It’s been beyond frustrating having to recreate or dig up files that would normally be at our fingertips and should be in a central, cloud-based location (but thanks, Camille, for going over to the house and rooting around in Charlie’s computer for the files he needed). Oh, and here’s a HUGE lesson we both learned on this (protracted) trip: we will never never never never – let me reiterate that – never travel anywhere without our MacBooks again. It has been torture of the worst kind trying to do real work on a (God and Apple, don’t strike me down for typing these words) Windows netbook. Quite aside from the crappy OS, none of the applications work right, the keyboard is all small and awkward, and in the case of the Sony netbook that we picked up in Paris yesterday, the stupid keys aren’t where they’re supposed to be!!!! It has, of all things, a French keyboard! I have always prided myself on my crappy typing skills. (A typing class? Me? Heck no, self taught two-finger typist, thank you very much!) But as it happens, I type better than I thought I did – on a QWERTY keyboard that is. Now I’m typing on a AZERTY keyboard, and let me tell you, it’s a frigging nightmare. Plus the French clearly use the ! É è ù * $ à and ç WAY more than we do in the States. All of the menus and OS text is in French which I keep telling myself is a learning experience. Chuck, meanwhile, is limping along on a Toshiba netbook. (And I say, why is he whining? He has a QWERTY keyboard. But I don’t like to ask questions, as then I have to find the question mark on this damned keyboard! Meagan, stop laughing!) The moral of the story is that even though we like to be “unplugged” from time to time, we are connected people, and our Macs are like little rectangular family members. And I’m sorry I ever called them fat. They’re not fat, they’re just perfect! And from here on out, they are coming with us wherever we go. Full disclosure: we weren’t going to bring any computers on this trip (iPhones don’t count, they’re like, um, a sixth finger). Almost at the last minute I decided to bring my netbook. It’s light, cheap, and if it were lost or stolen would not make me lose a minute of sleep and I could blog and upload photos as we traveled. Chuck scoffed at this indication of my addiction to technology, but accepted it. And it was nice: I did indeed blog and upload photos as we traveled, look up the odd piece of info that the iPhones couldn’t handle. Life was good. And then an unpronounceable volcano (okay, it’s actually pronounced AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul)  in Iceland erupted. My MacBook weighs a shade over 4 pounds; The netbooks, with their batteries attached, clock in at just under 3 pounds. I will take that extra pound any day of the week. Next trip, it doesn’t matter, the Macs are coming with us. We may never use them (hahahahahaha!) but they’ll be there, our faithful reliable friends.

So here we are, stranded in Paris until next Sunday. We’ve worked out a nice flow to our days. We get up, go for a run, shower, breakfast then spend the rest of the morning dealing with work stuff. Around 1pm or 2pm we head out to explore something we haven’t seen (today it was the Pantheon) and have some lunch at a cafe that strikes our fancy. Then we catch the train back to Roissy where we put in  a few more hours of work (by then we’re on California time) and have a dinner of bread, cheese and wine from the local store. Okay, I realize that at this point nobody feels sorry for us anymore. But did I mention that we’re far from home? And we don’t have our Macs? And we’re eating bread and cheese because you could go broke eating in fancy restaurants every night?

Whatever. Okay, I realize this doesn’t sound like such an awful way to spend a week but in our minds, we were all set to come home this past Monday. And everything since has been (it seems to me) to have been an overwhelming cascade of mildly hysterical (mis/dis)information (in some places this is also known as CNN). We miss our dog. We miss fiber optic high speed Internet. We miss clothes dryers. Personally, I really miss a QWERTY keyboard. We’re past ready to come home. Paris is awesome, but it’s most awesome when it’s the place we choose to be, not some place that some obscure Icelandic volcano forces us to be.

Pics of the ongoing adventure are here.

Today we drove to Wales (not that far, as it happens, from Bristol) and visited Carreg Cennen castle, the only castle in Wales owned by a Welshman. What was great about it was that it was completely unsupervised: we could climb the walls, go down into caves and generally behave like unruly kids and there was nobody there to tell us to be careful or behave ourselves. Fun! Wales is absolutely beautiful, and we spent several hours rambling on a lovely trail near the castle. I’d love to go back and spend several days just hiking around Wales. The only sad thing that happened was that poor Meagan finally made the connection between lamb chops and little lambikins frolicking in fields.

Completely clouding the past two days has been news of the Icelandic volcano which when it first erupted seemed like a fairly uneventful climatic blip on the radar. The joke was on us, as the volcano has utterly disrupted all travel into and out of Europe. We are supposed to fly from Bristol to Paris tomorrow afternoon and the chances of that happening are less than the odds of peace on earth by next Wednesday. If we miss that flight we will almost certainly miss our flight out of Paris to home on Monday. *sigh* So our first task tomorrow is to see if we can get seats on any train out of London to Paris tomorrow. (Travelers everywhere are laughing as I type these words.) We kept thinking that the volcanic ash would keep blowing northeast and all would be fine. Instead, the ash just keeps on coming. Transatlantic ocean liner options are looking attractive right now.

So it goes. Meanwhile, pics of our travels are here and here.

Possessed by demons, we spent three weeks doing madcap running & racing in preparation for the race. We broke all sorts of running rules (don’t increase your mileage by more than 10% a week, don’t introduce lots of uphill or downhill all at once, stretch regularly, blah, blah, blah). So we paid the price. In Chuck’s case, it’s an achy hip, a tight IT band, and tired legs. In my case it’s a recurrence of my old friend plantar fasciitis. Argh! But a bit of rest and recuperation (and in Chuck’s case some physical therapy) and we are both back on the road running but treating our various achy bits a tad more kindly. I went to a foot guy today just to be on the safe side and got a clean bill of health to run the marathon. he came in , took one look at my feet and exclaimed, “What size are your feet?!” in a kind of amazed voice. I was torn between being flattered and embarrassed, but admitted that I’m a size 11. Happily, though large,  they are not suffering from stress fractures, arthritis or any other maladies.

So now we are officially in the “getting really excited” phase and aside from training are also prepping to pack smart. We went to REI this past weekend and spent our entire dividend on travel stuff. Chuck bought a new bag (an Osprey 28″) that weighs just 11 pounds!! We’re being careful, since our bag weight limit is 44 pounds because we are flying from Paris to Bristol and the weight limit is lower than from the US to Europe. We both also bought nifty REI carry on bags for our cameras, iPods, iPad (!), running clothes, toothbrushes (in case disaster happens and our luggage is lost), and paperwork. Our itinerary at the moment is to arrive in Paris a few days before the marathon to get over jet lag and get acclimated, do some sightseeing with our other friends who are running the marathon, then spend two days post-marathon seeing Paris and learning to walk again (joke!). Then we fly to Bristol to spend 5 days with our good friend Meagan and her oh-so-cute British boyfriend Jock seeing Wales, Stonehenge, Oxford, and going on – get this! – a pub crawl! We also will get to participate in a pub quiz, which sounds a lot like NTN Trivia (it’s called Buzztime now) which we used to play a lot, and meet Jock’s parents (we will do our best to be respectable and not burp or fart in front of them,  Meagan and Judy). Fun times!

We had Thanksgiving dinner at the Redstone Inn, a lovely place where our view out the windows was of snow covered mountains. On Friday, we took part in the Hotel Colorado’s annual Christmas lighting ceremony which had live music, fireworks, hot cocoa and cookies to recommend it. I have never done anything like that before, and have to say that it really did get me in the holiday spirit! Chuck was really jazzed and inspired by all of the holiday lawn art – they had reindeer, trains, carolers and sleighs. He plans on putting up our holiday lights this coming weekend and incorporating some of the Hotel Colorado’s ideas.

We started the drive home on Sunday, stopping in St. George UT for the night, having no desire to fight the increasingly heavy holiday traffic any further. The rest of the drive on Monday was easy and fast, and we nearly finished an excellent audio book called The Last Oracle. All in all, it was an excellent holiday weekend and nicely achieved our goal of creating a whole host of new and happy holiday memories. Pics here.

Yesterday quite by accident we had the chance to go on a walk-through of a brand new 10 million dollar house in the foothills above downtown Aspen. Wow! I’ve never been inside a 10 million dollar house, but if this place was any example – whoa! Six bedrooms, seven and a half baths, two media rooms, three fireplaces, two master bedrooms (one was a guest master bedroom); the list of amazing stuff went on and on. We spent some time contemplating who among the people we know who we might coerce into joining us in investing in the ten million dollar house. In the end we decided to  look for something in the under ten million dollar range. So it goes.

Pics so far are here.