Happy New Year!

Originally the plan was to meet up with Drew and Leontine in Amsterdam for a couple of days - on the occasion of their being in the Netherlands to visit Leontine's family - and then returning to Geneva to celebrate the new year in our little home. Already during September we planned to surprise Drew by also meeting Diego and his wife Lea in Amsterdam. Despite lacking an actual plan for the execution of the surprise meeting we managed to have Diego and Lea walk into a café where the other four of us were already sitting and talking.

Diego - Drew

Lea - Leontine

The last part of the plan didn't go quite as smoothly - when we reached Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in the afternoon of the day of New Year's Eve we realized that our flight to Geneva was delayed: expected departure some 4 hours later than originally scheduled. There we were, and decided to start killing time by shopping in the many stores in Schiphol. Afterwards we used the food vouchers the airline had given us, first for ice cream, then some pasta and salad. All this while the restaurants and shops in the airport were closing one by one and most of the remaining flights of 2008 were cancelled. The last couple of hours we were sitting in an increasingly empty hall and reading a little. Around the earlier estimated time of departure the aeroplane that was to take us to Geneva finally landed, and we learned that the late arrival was caused by Geneva's airport being closed for 3 hours due to a snow storm.

mmmmm... ice cream!

We took off around 10 pm, landed around 11 pm and were happy to see that trains were still running from the airport to the city. Of course it took a while to get the luggage and getting through passport controls, but we got on the train 11:47 and got off at Geneva's main station some 6 minutes later. Midnight stroke just as we were unlocking our bikes to get the last bit of the way home that way - the sky was lit up above our heads with accompanying blasts and we stopped for a few minutes to behold the fireworks. Home at last about a quarter of an hour into the new year we decided that the day had already been long enough and postponed the champagne and the steaks purchased prior to the trip for a New Year's Dinner on New Year's Day.