Well, *that* was fun...can we go home now?

Hi again, everyone-

First things first: we have arrived safe and sound in Geneva, with all our luggage, and have managed our first night of sleep in our new digs here in Ferney-Voltaire, France.

We had moved out of our old apartment at Como Student Community Cooperative (CSCC) in Minneapolis on September 29th. Most of our stuff went to storage, and some of it to generous and willing friends and family. We stayed in a finished "basement apartment" - complete with sliding glass door, patio and view of Lake Owasso for the final week - while tying up loose ends, cleaning up the old apartment, and generally making ready for our big move. Thanks to Tasse Anderberg, a friend from our church, for her gracious hospitality in letting us stay there.


A brief video of the surroundings for our brief stay at the lake can be found at http://www.dropshots.com/kdudero.

At 5:45 p.m. on Saturday October 6th, our friends Pete & Shannon arrived to take us to the airport. Shannon drove off with our Saturn, which she will be using now to drive to and from work. We're glad that this car can be made use of in our absence! Pete helped load up the minivan with our pieces of luggage, and off we went to Minneapolis-St. Paul International.

Ben in the security line at MSP airport

Our flights and connections went by without a hitch (Aside from a brief panic I had when I thought I'd immediately lost our boarding passes) - praise God! We flew direct to Amsterdam overnight, departing Mpls. at 9:25 p.m. and arriving in Amsterdam around 12:30 local time (8 hour flight). Then we had a two hour layover until our final leg into Geneva, which arrived at 4:35 p.m. local time. (Geneva is seven hours ahead of Minneapolis time).

And now for what many of you have waited for: the answer to the question, "How did Ben do on the flights?" He did marvelously! Thanks all for praying. He was in remarkably good spirits the whole way through. He only managed to get 5 hours of sleep on the overnight flight. I got around 3 hours or so, and Kathy says she only snoozed during that time. A brief video of Ben happily playing with his feet on our second leg flight can be found at http://www.dropshots.com/kdudero.

For the record, the weather was amazing. 85 humid degrees in Minneapolis the day we left. And sunny and warm in Geneva when we arrived. The approach to Geneva is simply gorgeous on days like this. Kathy said she was actually, finally excited to be moving to Geneva as we watched the distant Alps float by in all their grandeur.


It felt like home, felt strangely familiar, since we had spent two months here in the summer of 2006. Kathy still has this abiding sense of being "at home" this morning.

Note from Kathy: During my quiet time this morning (first stretch of true quiet for a month!) I remembered when I last had this feeling: in 2nd grade when our family moved to the Farm House in Perkasie. Then, as now, I had a sense of coming home, of belonging. It's not the house that's doing it this time...as best as I can sense, it's the land, the mountains. This sense came to me last summer too. A sense of being understood somehow, welcomed. If not by the language itself, the countryside of France is happy to see me, and I am heartened to be here with it. Now, on to the tasks of the day! Back to you, Phil...

We were met at Geneva airport by "Vlad", a postdoc hired by the U of Minnesota Physics Department. We're rooming with him in a four-bedroom house in Ferney that is rented by the UofM until he (or we) find our own place to live. The airport itself is right on the French/Swiss border, and we were told of a sneaky way to avoid going through customs twice by taking a side-route through the airport to French passport control and French customs. They didn't even look at our passports or luggage!

Even with as small as the "Peugot Partner" van that Vlad was driving looked, we still managed to get our 8 pieces of luggage plus backpacks and miscellaneous bags into it, and drove the short distance to our new home. My adviser's wife had shown us pictures of the place before, so we were ready for what we found. The living room/dining area is at garden level with patio doors facing a small lawn. The room is fairly spacious (by European standards). But there is no carpeting anywhere. Previous boarders had purchased a few area rugs, but mostly the whole place is an echo chamber. Up from the back entrance one-half flight of stairs is three bedrooms and a puny water closet. Another half-flight of stairs leads you to the master bedroom, occupied by Vlad, and shower room.

With the rest of the evening ahead of us, we set about to sweeping up the dust bunnies, killing daddy long legs and rearranging the rooms we chose to sleep in. Ben fell asleep around 7:00 p.m. By 10ish we were ready to drop dead exhausted on our bed - except Ben. Finally all of the strange and wonderful goings on caught up to him. He woke up again around 11:00 p.m., and it took Kathy until 1:30 a.m. to get him to fall asleep again! He's still sleeping as of this writing.

Meanwhile I'm fighting off a sinus cold. I was up until 11:30 p.m. trying to get my computer to connect to the wireless network in our house, to no avail. There is only a single cable connection to our network box, which we have to shall have to share with our roomies until we understand how to configure the wireless.

The title of this post alludes to the inevitable second thoughts one has when making such a drastic move in your life. The trip was better than we could have expected, but the reality of having to share a dusty echo chamber with two strangers ("Seth" will be arriving on Friday) is setting in. And I think Ben was feeling the same thing too. At one point last night, Ben's cries and Vlad's phone conversations in Serbian and French were assaulting my tired ears with a discordant clash of experiences previously separated in my life.

Well, that's more than enough for now! Our plan today is for me to go in and start filing paperwork, and for Kathy to start shopping for things we need. Thanks everyone for all your prayers and love and support.

Regards,
-"PKBD" - Phil, Kathy and Ben, the Dudes in Geneva