At this moment I’m sitting in the Newark airport with a boarding pass for Amsterdam and another one for Athens, Greece resting in my lap. I love how in about an hour I’ll be boarding a plane in the United States and tomorrow morning we will be departing that same plane in Holland. We live in a pretty amazing world.

This past week has been insane. As you know we are renting  our house out for the next five weeks. I sort of became a neurotic perfectionist in terms of cleaning, organizing and readying our home for our guests. On top of that, several hours were unexpectedly spent in doctors offices getting something “suspicious” checked out. We always have some sort of medical crisis during our travels and I’m hoping I’ve already crossed that off our list!

We left our house on Friday and spent a couple of nights at my mom’s. I became a little tearful leaving our home. I’ve never lived anywhere I’ve been sad to leave and my house is never that clean. Hopefully it will be just as clean and organized when I return in several weeks.

So far our journey has gone smoothly. We took a rental car from Ithaca and drove to Newark. While in line for security a man behind me complimented my new Eddie Bauer bag. It turns out he has the same one! This man and his wife were returning home after a trip to Ireland to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. Turns out he’s a song writer and she’s a singer. You can check them out on facebook at The Forgotten Carols.

Now the plan is we’ll board this plane soon, eat some disgusting airplane food, watch a few good movies, and try to sleep. In the morning (very early morning in New York) we will arrive in Amsterdam. We have a four hour layover followed by a 3 hour flight to Athens. If all goes smoothly, we’ll arrive in Athens around 10:30 AM EST. We’ll have a (sweaty) whirlwind tour of Athens and super early Wednesday we are catching a ferry to Santorni!

Goodbye USA!! See you in 5 weeks! Greece, here we come!!