Day 11 - Coming Home!

It’s hard to believe, but today is the last day in Holland. After 10 days of touring here, there and everywhere, it is time to get back on the plane to go home. The trip has flown by incredibly fast – we have a million and one memories flying thru our heads from all the things we had seen and done. So many things in fact, it’s actually pretty hard to keep them all straight (hence the mix up of when we went to Belgium)! If it hadn’t been for the pictures (and some “msn’ing” with Alvar’s Mom!), I’m not sure how we could have remembered it all ;)

We enjoyed our final breakfast together at the Koophandel – a wonderful buffet of fresh baked buns, gouda cheese, yogurts, fresh fruit, boiled eggs and lots of other delicious things! After breakfast we got our bags together and packed up the van – our plane at Schiphol Airport was calling our names!

We got to the airport in great time, and even had time to grab a light snack and coffee before boarding the plane. We went thru customs without much hassle…”not much” meaning that I only had to take off my shoes and (unfortunately) Alvar got “frisked”, other than that, we got thru no problem!

Alvar and I decided to get the movie players on the plane on the way home – it was going to be close to 7 1/2 hours; and so we thought, rather than sleep, we’d wind ourselves up with some good old television. The flight home had some minor turbulence, nothing to get too stressed about ;), we also were able to see some fantastic icebergs while flying somewhere over Greenland, and there were also some amazing cloud formations as well (some pictures of that following).

After saying our good-byes to the family we headed back home again. I have to admit, the drive home was fairly “boring” as the landscape in Holland was much more “alive” on the highway drive out there – guess that means we’ll have to go back again (start saving up some serious money!!)! We picked up the kids right away, and boy, was it fantastic to see the kids again J Caleb wouldn’t let go of me, Anna kind of “bounced” around, happy to see us – and at first I thought Esther was so happy to see she broke down and cried (but, I found out later she was quite sad to leave, she lived “next door” to a good friend of hers from school, and was going to miss her dearly – so it wasn’t me she missed!). I think (hope) maybe deep deep down somewhere, she was happy to see us again too ;)

Kids opening up their gifts from Holland - best part of the parents coming home!

All and all it was great to be home again, get back into ‘regular’ life and routines (although, I didn’t really miss laundry, diapers, making lunches or getting up “on-time” during our trip at all either!).

I hope you all enjoyed the little “tidbits” of our days in Holland. It was great to ‘re-live’ the memories again as I wrote them and looked thru the pictures. I might be taking a “breather” from all the blogging for a bit (like a day or two ;) – so I can catch up on some evening work around here again as it took up just a little bit of my time!!