Good lord, it's been awhile! I guess Facebook has taken care of my need to broadcast too much information about my ubernormal life, so I haven't written in whole paragraphs for too long. Maybe I can remember how.

I'm going to create a series of posts that will be a travelogue of the trip I took to Budapest and Prague with my sister, Alice, under the auspices of the tour company, Road Scholar, formerly known as Elderhostel. Lots of praise for that company, BTW. I strongly recommend it. (And if you wind up signing on with it for a trip, tell them Carla List-Handley sent you; I think I can get credit towards another tour. Okay. Shameless self-advertising done. Sorry about that but I would love to take another trip.) I'm going to post photos I took; if I can restrain myself, I'll only put up the best ones. I missed a few highlights because my phone malfunctioned but I did get some from each day.

This post will be short (and by the end of the 9, you'll be saying, Thank God!), covering only my travel from Cadyville, NY,  to Budapest, Hungary.

No photos of the beginning of the trip. It was the "wee hours of the morning." It was pitch dark. Not conducive to snapshots. My sainted husband, Bruce, volunteered to drive me to Burlington, VT, the airport closest to me that is served by major airlines. This involves a 30 minute drive to Plattsburgh Bay on Cumberland Head where we take a ferry across Lake Champlain to Grand Isle, VT. That's followed by another 30 minute drive through the islands to Burlington's airport. And Bruce really is a saint: I was hoping to take the 3:25 A.M. (!!) ferry and we actually just caught the 2:45 a.m. one. Obviously I sat in the airport for awhile with surprisingly many other sleepwalkers who helped fill (fill!!) a 6:00 a.m. flight from BTV to Atlanta. (How could there have been that many idiots up that early who needed to go to Atlanta? Of course, it was a Delta flight and Delta makes even God go through Delta to get a connecting flight, I'm convinced.)

I spent the next 6 hours in beautiful ATL, convincing myself I did not need a $350 Coach bag, or $13,000 Movado watch, or any Swarovski tchotchkes. Nor did I need to fall asleep and miss my transatlantic flight, so dozing was out of the question. It's amazing what adrenalin can do for you, given a little caffeine bump from time to time. There were no glitches in the travel at all with an on-time departure for Amsterdam. Yay! And I actually slept on that 8-hour flight! (I'll give a small plug here for a travel device called a Trtl. It's a neck wrap with a plastic brace inside it that prevents your head from dropping to your chest thus encouraging the giraffe segment of your evolution, elongating the back of your neck. The Trtl does wrap so it also enables you to cover your mouth, preventing fellow passengers from witnessing the copious amounts of spit you drool in your sleep.) And I woke up shortly before descending to Amsterdam airport.

These photos I took as we departed from Amsterdam, heading southeast. And I say we because this is where I hitched up with my sister. We had been directed to put our shiny new RoadScholar luggage tags prominently on both checked and carry-on bags so that we could spot fellow RScholars; we saw none.

So here is the Netherlands, or at least the area around Amsterdam, from the air. I find this perspective fascinating: what ARE some of those structures anyway? And if any of you think our Midwest is flat, you're wrong. The Netherlands are FLAT. But pretty neat to look at, I think you'll agree.