On A Grand Tour

And we are off! For the next couple of years, Kurt and I get to live the expat life in Geneva, Switzerland while Kurt works on his post-doc at CERN, an international laboratory in Geneva. Most of the subject matter of his work goes way over my head, but when he uses terms like “antimatter” and “lasers,” it sounds straight out of a sci-fi movie.

What is so exciting is the opportunity to run around all of Geneva, Switzerland, Europe, and maybe even further over the next couple of years. For anyone who doesn’t know Kurt and I well, we are suckers for any size of adventure, big, small, or somewhere in the middle. Of course we had to make even something as mundane as moving into an adventure – I don’t recommend trying to move to Europe from the United States with two suitcases each in the middle of a global pandemic!

From the extreme limitation in flight options causing the journey to be a whopping 4-flight, 24-hour trip, to the mandatory mask requirement on the entirety of said 24-hour trip, to the “proceed straight from the airport into quarantine” rule, our entrance into Europe was nothing short of eventful. Remarkably though, with the exception of the few moments of bated breath when our luggage was weighed (each suitcase weighed between 48.7 and 49.0 lbs – that’s what I call precision packing!) and when the woman next to us in line was barred from getting on the flight for making the mistake of getting a rapid Covid test rather than a full Covid test, all in all the trip went smoothly. And as the Atlantic Ocean turned into green rolling hills framed by snow-capped peaks and we descended over the massive and crystal-blue Lac Leman into Geneva, all of the stress and adrenaline of the last week, into which we somehow crammed the finishing, defending, and celebrating of the completion of Kurt’s PhD dissertation, the packing, moving, selling, and storing of all of our possessions, the ending of my job, the packing of 4 suitcases that would be all that came with us to Europe, and the preparing to move to a foreign country straight into quarantine, all faded away into excitement. This is going to be fun!

My goal in creating this blog is simply to provide our family and friends with a chronicle of the adventures of the next two years. I want nothing more than to give all of our loved ones lots of ideas for things to do once Americans are once again allowed in Europe and everyone can come visit us! We can’t wait to share this experience with all of you. Cheers to the start of our Grand Tour!