Hi!

Hello!  We are home!  Nothing feels like home after a long trip.

I tried so hard to blog during the trip - but guess what?  While every financial institution we do business with had no problem with me logging on from 5000+ miles away, Blogger stopped me at every turn.  Frustrating!  But oh well.  I hadn't logged on to Blogger via the iPad ever and I think they were being 'safe'.  When I logged on this morning, they had a 'flag' stating they had stopped a possible fraudulent access - I confirmed it was me and then all was OK.

We had a long, long flight home - 2.5 hours from Rome to Amsterdam and then a mad dash from Terminal C to Terminal G (AND we had to go through customs too) and an 11.5 hour flight from Amsterdam to SFO.  Watched Frozen and Gravity and plenty of TV - and dozed off and on.  By the time we got home, visited with H., had dinner and surfed the web for a bit, we were approaching 24 hours awake - so I went to bed around 6PM and slept until 4AM this morning.

Now it's catching up on banking; mail; chatting with family; laundry (oh, the laundry!).

Am proud to report the house looks very good - H. did a really good job of keeping things tidy.  Floors were swept and mopped; dishes done and ready to unload; entire house vacuumed. Now we just do our laundry, his laundry and every towel in the house.

I am off until Wednesday and so glad to have today and tomorrow to regroup.  It was a whirlwind trip with constant movement and I need to chill for a bit.  And jet lag is a bitch.  I feel tired and disoriented.  It will pass.

We are already planning a return trip to Paris in March, 2015, for our 25th wedding anniversary.  We're hoping to rent an apartment!  We loved all three places we visited but Paris has so many museums that we want to explore - so we want a block of time there as our first return trip.

Bye for now - I will be back with a 'travelogue' (which I will warn you about at the start of each post so if my vacation memories don't interest you, you can skip it).