North America

And so the Koalaman and I are just back from two weeks in our home countries of Canada and the United States. Unfortunately I left my camera there, so I have no photos to post as of yet. They are on their way, I promise.

But we had a wonderful time! We got on the Tube at the station near our flat and rode for an hour, then flew from London to Geneva to Montreal to Toronto, and then we got in the car and drove for about 10 hours to my parents' place. We stopped to get some sleep at a hotel in the middle of the drive. Incidentally, the stop in Montreal was a surprise to us. We bought the tickets thinking that there was only one stop in Geneva, but when we got there, the sign at the gate said, 'Toronto, via Montreal.' So at Montreal we had to get off the plane, go through customs, collect our luggage, drop it off again, go through security, and then get back on the same plane to fly to Toronto. And we were very glad we looked on the carousel for our luggage because they had assured us in London that our bags were checked through all the way to Toronto, but they were not!

Wedding preparations were going on at Dad and Mom's house. My brother got married that weekend in the backyard, and yours truly was Coordinator-In-Chief. Meaning that my job was to boss everyone around and then be picked on by my brothers for being bossy. Anyway, the wedding came off beautifully and with nice, cool weather for it. One expects heat and humidity in the Midwest in August.

Everyone started packing up and leaving at the end of the weekend, but the Koalaman and I stayed on with my parents for a couple of days. We went to the southern tip of Illinois for some walking in the beautiful National Forest there. And we ate some of the best sweetcorn in the world!

Midweek we packed up and started driving north. We stopped in my hometown so I could show the Koalaman some of my old haunts. We stopped at the house that I lived in for 23 years and the current owner let us wander around inside and all around the yard and buildings! It was so kind of him, and so nice to see the place again. We continued northward until we got to the Koalaman's sister's home. She and her family live on a boat, and we got to spend the night there before heading toward the Koalaman's mum's house.

There we spent the week visiting family, kayaking, four-wheeling, and having a bonfire. The bonfire was actually thanks to some neighbors who had set up (on my in-laws' property) several paint-balling hideouts in the form of sheets of plywood a couple of years ago. They had all fallen down and were rotting, so we collected them up into a stack and torched them. It was great fun!

Neither of us was very ready to make the long journey to come home. It was four hours of driving to get to the airport, then the obligatory two-hour wait for the flight, then the flights from Toronto to Montreal to Geneva to London, and then of course an hour on the Tube back to our flat. I was exhausted and jet-lagged, but very glad to have been able to make the trip.