The first few days

We’ve arrived in Neuchâtel for a year of work and adventure. Our departure was more hectic than we’d hoped and less frantic than it might have been. With the generous help of family and friends, we managed to get the house in order for our tenants and pile our bags and our bodies into a taxi that was just barely big enough to hold us, but we made it.

Be prepared!

The flights — Vancouver to Reykjavik, Reykjavik to Stockholm, and Stockholm to Geneva — were smooth. The kids were well equipped with gadgets — iPods and Kindles and travel pillows and headphones — all of which were speedily put to use. They may have helped distract the kids from the one great disadvantage of our bargain-basement Icelandair flight: the indifferent and very expensive in-flight food. Yup, that’s right: Icelandair charges exorbitant sums for meals on its Atlantic flights. (This may be normal practice in North America, but neither Sophia nor I expected it on a trans-Atlantic journey…)

Some other quirks: when we disembarked in Reykjavik, we were shunted into a security check. Iceland has visitors to their little country go through a full and agonizingly slow security check, complete, in my case, with a lingering and intimate patdown from a slightly surly security officer. The slowness of the security check meant that we couldn’t grab a sandwich in the terminal, and had to rush to board our next flight. I did — to Sophia’s undisguised horror — grab four Mars bars from the duty-free shop. These helped tide all of us — including Sophia — over until we made it to Stockholm and then, four uneventful hours later, to our flight to Geneva.

We stayed in a lovely hotel — the Hotel de Genève. I’d highly recommend it. The rooms are lovely, the breakfasts are marvelous (excellent bread, strong, thick, just-brewed black coffee, a little pitcher of hot milk, fresh buttery pastries, and — Nutella. What more could you ask?

Geneva was in the throes of the Fêtes de Genève, so the streets were lively. We dragged the kids around to some of the places we’d found interesting when we lived there almost twenty years ago. And I tried (not entirely successfully, I fear) to explain the significance of Geneva and its gloomy reformers to the kids. They were not hugely impressed by Calvin’s square-backed chair and the feelings of martyrdom and self-sacrifice that chair must have engendered in the dour Frenchman.

Geneva: Nathalie, Sophia, and Pierre in the old city

If you look carefully at the photo above, you may notice the legs of what might have been an Old Testament figure lurking in the mosaic behind the kids. But the kids were delighted to note that this is a mosaic of an entirely different kind of god: Neptune.

It’s not Abraham, by Jove! It’s Neptune!

The three of us who don’t suffer from vertigo enjoyed the ferris wheel next to the Pont du Mont Blanc; I sat at the bottom of the dread apparatus and waited a little impatiently for the others to come back to earth.

Geneva surprised us. Geneva was fun. Just about everyone we had to deal with — the taxi driver who got us from Cointrin to the hotel; the desk clerks at the hotel; the CFF (national trains) agents; and even a pharmacist who sold us bandaids to cover the scrapes that Nathalie suffered when she tumbled down an escalator were delightful.

There was a serpent lurking in this slightly Edenic Geneva, though. We knew something about the challenges facing us on the final leg of our trip: the challenge of luggage.  We had eight suitcases, each weighing close to the maximum 23 kilograms IcelandAir allows its economy passengers, and more carry-on luggage than a reasonable airline ought to allow. While this posed some challenges — legroom, for instance — it was an inconvenience, not a serious problem. But Swiss trains are a different matter. Boarding a train with two children and thirteen pieces of baggage can’t be done quickly, and even if it could be done quickly, there’s no place to put all that stuff. And getting from the hotel to the train station with that mountain of duffel bags and old suitcases with rickety wheels promised to overwhelm us.

We worried. And worried some more. What about the disembarkation in Neuchâtel? How were we to get that pile of stuff up the steep hill to our new apartment?

Salvation unexpectedly lay at the CFF office. It turns out that the railways offer a baggage service — a baggage service that will not only take your bags for you, but will pick them up at any address you choose and deliver them to whatever second address you choose in Switzerland for not very much money at all. And they do it in twenty-four hours. And so we, on August 1, we made our way to the promised land.

Here’s what we saw from our living room window that evening:

The fireworks were spectacular, launched from barges in the lake. And we didn’t feel particularly diminished by the fact that these were not launched in celebration of our arrival… Well. Most of us.

Sophia did feel a bit smaller the next day.