We apologize to our dedicated readers that our last post has been delayed, especially if you were concerned that we may have been involved in another earthquake. We didn’t write a last post because to be honest, we didn’t do too much. We woke up and wandered to another part of town we hadn’t seen yet. It was a residential part with a few shops sprinkled in but we did see some awesome houses and apartments which were neat to see. We did see one last church on our walking trip. After this we made our way to an AUTHENTIC Swiss brunch (my dad and sister were mad that we hadn’t posted pictures of any authentic food). I got to laugh at Caity as she tried to figure out how to eat soft boiled eggs "appropriately." And to end the day we went to a pizza joint right on Lake Lucerne.
The following morning we made our way back to Paris since we were flying back the next day. The drive was fairly uneventful until we got back into the Paris area. I was the lucky one who had this leg of the drive, which happened to be during rush hour. There are really no rules is what I learned while driving. Mopeds speed past on both sides, lanes are painted but don’t serve any real purpose, and if you want to make a turn you are going to be waiting for oncoming traffic all while being honked at. We finally made it to where our Google maps pointed us, but they were directing us to the car rental office, not the garage where you park the rental car. This unfortunately made us circle the Paris city block 4 times (passing the Notre Dame 4 times, and taking about an hour). We finally got the car where it needed to be and made our way back on the metro towards our hotel by the airport. The fun was just beginning.
We woke up the next morning at 7:00 for our 10:20 flight in order to catch the airport shuttle at 7:40. Once 8:10 rolled around with no shuttle in sight we got an Uber, and I am still convinced that if we wouldn’t have then we would have missed our flight. We navigated our way to the appropriate security gate where we underwent our first line of questioning. Why are you here? Where did you go? What do you do for a job? Did you like Switzerland or Paris better? Stuff like that. Once we answered the questions sufficiently we dropped our big backpacks off and headed for security. The first line was for the border police to look at IDs. This line was long and nasty because you had people cutting in line because they were going to be late for their flights but there were some cutEES (not the cutters) who were making it known how pissed off they were and that everyone was trying to get somewhere. We finally got past this part around 9:30 (boarding started at 9:27). At this point I was pretty nervous because we still hadn’t gone through the physical security part and once we passed the border police we noticed that we had to get on a tram to get to our gate. Luckily the security line once we got off the tram was extremely short. Then came time to scan our tickets at the gate, Cait got through fine and a red light went off when my ticket was scanned so I was taken to a different area where they made me empty my carry-on and swabbed my bag with something. I passed that test and then we made our way down the stairs to the runway where we had to get on a bus to take us to our actual plane. By this point the conversations on the bus ride over were priceless. Most of them went something like this “I have never been through anything like this”, "I was just cavity checked," or “What are we doing now? Driving to Detroit?” We eventually boarded and made our way to Detroit.
We landed in Detroit around noon (6:00 PM in Paris). Our flight to Chicago took off at 3:30. That flight went a lot better than expected considering the weather was not great in Chicago and our pilots looked like they were 23 years old. The next leg of our journey was making our way back to Des Moines. Of course the drive couldn’t be simple. Once we got out of Chicago rush hour traffic we hit one of the worst rain storms I have ever driven through. And once we got through that we stopped at a gas station right when we got into Iowa, I walked out of the bathroom and realized I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring. I went into panic mode and checked the car and then thought about why I would have noticed right after I walked out of the bathroom which led me to digging through the gas station trash can until I eventually found it laying at the bottom of one of the bathroom cans. The rest of the drive went smoothly even though at this point we were closing in around 24 straight hours of being awake. We arrived home around 10 PM on Wednesday night and were back to work at 8:00 AM on Thursday.
We apologize for the delay in this last posting but once again we want to thank anyone who followed along during this most recent journey. I know we'll have some more up our sleeves.