The eagle has landed

Well, we made it. We're certainly not in a hurry to relive the last couple of days in Basel trying to finish all the countless last-minute tasks in an empty apartment with all of us fighting off various illnesses. But, thanks to a bunch of help from our friends (with special kudos to Liz & Douglas for helping with just about every imaginable task, and to The Big Finn for getting up at the crack of dawn--with a little help from a wake-up call from Gretchen--and driving us and our mountains of stuff to Zurich Airport), it all came together. When we boarded the plane we could see the looks of concern on everyone's faces in our general vicinity, but Baby did great on the plane. So did Gretchen, especially when I didn't tell her I was taking something to knock me out because I wasn't feeling well and so she was stuck with Baby while I suddenly and blissfully napped for an hour or two. I'll say this much--after flying most of the time in business class for three years, it's hard moving to the more cramped back of the plane! (Although at least the guy who checked us in for United was nice enough to seat us in Economy Plus with a few extra inches of legroom.) Even Grady seemed to come through it no worse for wear. After about 9 hours of flying, we emerged in a dazed state from customs at Dulles Airport and good friends Dave and Chris were waiting to whisk us and our stuff--it took both of their cars plus I had to take a taxi with the dog crate--back to their houses on a glorious, sunny and warm day, which was certainly an improvement over the snow on the ground when we left Zurich.

The reason they took us back to their houses rather than to our house was because on Saturday they went over to scope out our house and discovered that the water had been cut off to our house so the gas company couldn't finish having our appliances ready, plus the cleaners weren't able to clean. So rather than sleep on air mattresses (as we had our last few nights in Basel) in an empty-but-dirty house with no water, they had mercy on us and we instead have been sleeping in comfy beds and eating delicious and inexpensive take-out food with good friends while trying to get things fixed at the house. (Don't even get us started on the incompetence of a property management company that, despite having at least six weeks to get the house ready, doesn't find out until the last minute that it's in a shambles. ARGH!)

So that's all a long way of saying that while things haven't exactly gone according to plan, we're doing well and slowly adjusting to our new American lives, about which more later...