Boston - Iceland - Utrecht

We left on Saturday night to fly via Iceland to Amsterdam to see my friend, Lynda, who was meeting us at the airport to take us to Utrecht, The Netherlands. The boys managed to sleep for one and a half hours on the first flight and none on the second flight. We landed at 11:00 on Sunday morning and by noon were with my friend Lynda on the train to Utrecht, a city outside of Amsterdam. She and her long-time boyfriend, Wim, have an apartment there since he's Dutch, but he lives in Germany since that's where he works.

The apartment is in a building that used to be a church. Its two bedrooms and large living/dining room has the original church arches. I went immediately to sleep, while the boys who didn't seem to need sleep played in the apartment on their new iPods and waited for me to get up so they could go exploring.

We left the apartment in the afternoon to go past the statue of St. Martin who permanently rides his horse who is trodding on a serpent in the apartment / church entranceway. Any clue who St. Martin is? I assume he conquered a giant snake somewhere.


                                            





We wandered the cobblestone sidewalks, went shopping for important necessities such as two-toned Nutella and stropewaffels and dined on a supper of patate (Dutch fries) with curry and peanut dipping sauce. It was all the boys could do to stay awake until 8:30 and then the collapsed until 10:00 the next morning.

The trip itself is still a whirl. Hard to think straight when I'm still trying to process a week in Cuba and being gone mid-school-year is odd. In school I showed the kids a movie based on a Kurt Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron. In the movie, everyone is forced to wear handicaps to prevent anyone from having unfair advantages. At one point in the movie a dancer is dancing with weights tied to his body, and unexpectedly the weights fall off. He is startled at first, and then his dancing becomes natural and the expression on his face is one of sudden joy and freedom. Leaving life in mid-stream to come to Europe suddenly feels like this weightlessness, only that I do miss the weights as well, considering I love both my husband and the job I left behind. I guess the analogy that I'm trying to make is that taking a journey like this does feel liberating and exciting. I can't wait to visit places I've been long ago, see old friends, and most importantly, show Henry and James new things.