Johnny's a Master

So, a week after we got home from Europe/South Africa, we road tripped it to North Carolina.  Why?

 To see this.

And this.

And this. 

I didn't think Johnny's MBA graduation would be such a big deal for me, but it kind of felt like we were getting married again.  They did such a great job with the ceremony. Everything was very family friendly.  It was just a wonderful day.  

Well, there was some waiting before the ceremony.  

I caught this picture a few minutes before.  The kids are on my phones (my old one I keep around for just such occasions), and Johnny's parents are on their devices.  I obviously had to take pictures to keep myself occupied since my devices were taken.

 And those teddy bears the kids are holding, yeah, they were giving them out to all the kids on the way in.

I did say it was an awesome program, right?  

Well, we stayed afterwards and enjoyed the food at the reception.  Then we went to the student center so Johnny could buy some swag.  Joy fell asleep in the car, so Grandma stayed behind with her, and The Captain and I headed out to a garden nearby on campus to take some 5 year old pictures.  

He was awesome because he showed me his "moves" by which he meant poses.  He loved doing the shoot and really got into it.  I guess I've been doing this with him for awhile.  These were some of my favorites:

 

He was being an explorer.

The Captain's Birthday

So The Captain had a birthday the week between our trips.  It was fun and definitely kept us on our toes.  

These days, any birthday, or celebration at all, calls for balloons.  So we picked up a few. And decorated the house while The Captain was sleeping, as per his request.

Birthday Breakfast: blueberry wheat pancakes with strawberry topping, and cantaloupe.

As you can see above, he chose to wear his new Superman shirt.  He wanted a Lego themed party.  We saw the Lego Movie (awesome!), ate lunch at McDonalds with a play place, of course.  

Birthday dinner: the pizza was not entirely due to the lack of groceries.

Yes, we all had to wear birthday hats.

 Lego cake 

 Blowing out candles

 Everyone enjoyed the cake

On Monday, we went to Legoland. Joy wanted to build a house, so we helped her build one just for her . . . with two windows . . . and no door . . . he he he.

Lego driving lessons

 Enjoying the Lego DFW area.

I think he had a good birthday.

South Africa

So with the business side of the trip over, we flew down to Johannesburg for Johnny's school immersion weekend.  Since I was not included in the school stuff, I spent most of my time watching TV, catching up on laundry, wandering around the few blocks of shopping center where the hotel was located, enjoying the milkshake bar (yes, they actually made milkshakes for you.  It was awesome.), and ordering room service.  I got a mani-pedi, got to relax, and obviously took zero pictures.  

So we move on to Cape Town, which was the only vacation Johnny got the whole trip.  So we enjoyed ourselves.  Unfortunately, my careful observation of the weather on my phone did nothing to improve the weather once we got there.  It rained and was overcast and fairly chilly our whole time there.  So we didn't get to see Table Mountain, or Robben Island, or chill at the beach.  But we did take a bus tour our first day after walking to Camps Bay.  Through that, we learned about some awesome museums that we wanted to visit.  So we decided to visit 4 museums the next day.  

First the Bo-Kaap Museum, which sadly was not very well organized, but still contained some cool info about Muslim art, and the January 2 Carnival that is celebrated in the city every year.  

But it was located on this street:

Bo-Kaap

where no one ever forgets which house is theirs. It reminded me of a book we read with The Captain called Mr. Pine's Purple House.  Speaking of books, when we were at the Gold Museum, our next stop, we got the best souvenir ever, this book:

  

which unfolds to show you a 4000 year history of the world with each major power running in parallel, so you can see what was happening in China during the reign of the Caesars, and so on.  It might be the coolest book ever.  And it's available on Amazon, though we got a better deal on it.  

We also went to the Section 6 Museum, which is more of a memorial, and the Jewish Museum & Holocaust Museum, which were definitely the best structured museums.  We also walked through the Company Gardens at the government buildings, and went to the Green Street Market Square.  

For dinner, we went back to Camps Bay and stopped for some beach pictures.  

Due to the inclement weather and the whole driving-on-the-opposite-side-of-the-road thing, we decided not to rent a car and drive to the Cape on our last day.  So we went to the V&A Waterfront instead.

Behold Johnny was actually there.

And we encountered this guy in the ocean two minutes after the above picture was taken.  

That may have been when we decided to go to the aquarium.  

Feeding the native penguins.

The Rock Star Penguin

Feeding the sea turtle.  

We got there just in time to see them feed many animals.  And speaking of timing, this happened:

Not sure why animals like to bare their teeth when I'm around, but it makes for some great shots. 

This is what the beaches in Cape Town are full of.  The seaweed basically makes this really cool underwater jungle. 

Moray Eel

And some cool anemones to end.

It was a great vacation.  It was a long trip.  I was excited to get back home.  Our flight from Cape Town to Heathrow was not horrible, but was not very pleasant either.  For some reason, the flight attendant didn't like me.  It was weird since I had no abnormal interactions with him, nor was I a nuisance in any way.  But the flight back to DFW redeemed it since the flight attendant there was awesome.  He was funny and chatted with me about kids and pregnancy, and he made me eat another lunch, and gave me a banana and extra water and stuff.  It was great.  But not as great as when the kids got home and the swelling went down in my legs.

Up next: The Captain turns 5, and more travels.

Europe Trip - the end

We would have stayed at our boutique in Tongeren longer, but they were booked up for the weekend, so we went to a golf course in Genk for a few days. Johnny got a ride into work, so I got to drive the rental car.  It was a lot of fun, actually.  Germans and Belgians are excellent drivers.  I went into a city called Hasselt on my way and spent the day in a fashion museum.  I really enjoy being able to go through museums at my own pace.  And this one came with the added bonus of nostalgia for the Costume Museum in Bath.

While we were in Genk, we drove into Maastricht, which is in the Netherlands, which is where Johnny had been working.  We would have stayed there the whole time, but there was an art festival and all the hotels were booked.  Hence the hotel in Tongeren.  Also the reason why our Tongeren hotel was booked that weekend.  Anyway, this is one of about 75 squares in Maastricht that look pretty similar.  This particular church was hosting an antiquity book sale as part of the art festival.  We were going to go in because me and old books are a match made in heaven, and because it was rather chilly and a little rainy outside, but it was ridiculously expensive just to go inside.  And since we weren't planning on actually buying anything, it seemed like a bit of a waste.

So we walked around the city instead.  It was lovely.  And there were about 200% more bicycles in The Netherlands than Belgium.  They are very good to cyclists there.  They have their own lanes, which means they can go really fast, so you really have to give them the right-of-way, even as a pedestrian.

After our weekend in Genk, we went to Ghent.  It was one of the coolest cities.  But I didn't take my camera out with me because by then I was a little worn out with all the walking.  So I spent some time recovering and relaxing in the hotel.  But I can turn your attention to Facebook to see all the Ghent pictures Johnny tagged me in from his phone.

We did ride the train into Paris one day because Johnny had to meet with a customer and it was a good halfway point.  We didn't have time to see all of Paris, of course, but we did go to the Dali museum.  He's one of Johnny's favorites.  And then we wondered around Montmartre, which is the artistic part of Paris and home to Sacre Coeur.  It's quite hilly, actually, which may have been what wore me out, now that I think about it.  I did get to impress Johnny by ordering pastries in French at a shop, and I'll take that any time I can get it.

Ghent was the end of our Europe trip, so we drove the rental car (a Ford Mondeo, in case Dad's wondering) back to Frankfurt, enjoying the Autobahn, flew to Heathrow, then on to Johannesburg on a mostly empty flight with very amusing flight attendants.

All in all, a great Europe trip.

Europe Trip - Tongren

We drove from Frankfurt to Tongeren, Belgium.  It was a gorgeous drive.  It reminded me of driving through western Virginia.  Only in every city there would be ridiculously old churches on the hills.  Awesome.

We had a great hotel here.  The best of our whole trip.  It was a little boutique, with only 7 rooms, which is probably because the rooms looked like this:

Pardon my mess, it's just the camera bag and 37 pillows from trying to sleep while pregnant.

This is the bathroom.  I had to walk through a second sleeping area to get here.  That is a heated towel rack.  This is way bigger than my bathroom at home.

This was the only downside to our room.  At least we were only on the second floor.  I felt like I took my life (and my unborn child's) into my hands every time I went down these stairs.  Luckily, we didn't have to carry our luggage up them, they have a dumb waiter they use for cleaning supplies.  I could have gotten a better picture, but my fear of heights kicked in.  Sorry.

This is our view from the hotel.  It was an awesome church.  My last day there I went inside and took some ridiculously blurry pictures, which will not be shown.  

Another view of the awesome church.

It was market day our first day there.  This is just the plant section.  They had clothes, lots of food and produce, and even fabric.  I would have taken more pictures, but I was in tourist mode, not photographer mode. 

I love the old buildings in Europe.  Also, I thought it was cool that all the kids had to wear safety vests as they were walking to school.  

Tongeren is one of the oldest cities in Europe, certainly in Belgium.  It was a Roman stronghold.  And they have an awesome museum that goes through the history of the town from early man through the end of the Romans. After I explored that, I went on one of the walking tours of the city.  I saw remnants of the old wall.

This was a section of the town built in the 1200s by a group of women called the Beguines.  They were not nuns or housewives, but opted to devote their lives to service.  They built hospitals and churches.  It's a pretty cool, little known bit of feminist history.

The church out our window wasn't the only one.  There was one in the Beguine.  And this one, recently remodeled, to St. James.

Europe Trip - Frankfurt

So in my attempt to not just improve my photography skills, but avoid the brain farts that so often mess up my photography sessions (sorry to everyone that's happened to), one of my goals this year is to only shoot in manual mode.

I was trying to take a picture every day in January, but my camera was commandeered to take online posting pictures for our small business, so I had to give that up.  My first chance to really take my time and get reacquainted with my camera was on my trip to Europe.  I will give background:

Part of Johnny's online MBA program is excursions that take place at the end of every semester at various locations.  Half are domestic, half international.  It is required to go to two of these in the two years of the program, however, you can earn credit for going to additional excursions, and you can go to as many as you want.  We decided early on that Johnny should go to as many as we could afford, both financially and temporally.  We also have had access to the list of locations for awhile, so we could plan out which ones Johnny wanted to attend.  The one in March (after Johnny's last semester) was scheduled for Johannesburg, South Africa.  We decided that we would go to it together last year.  So when I found out I was pregnant, we had to do some calculations to make sure I could still go.  Then we had to do some work finagling because they like to take advantage of Johnny already traveling.  In this case, the "while he was at it" involved his annual trip to Europe.  Not really close, but close enough for the company, I suppose.  So after a little debate, I decided to tag along.

That is how I ended up being gone for 18 days without the kids overseas.

Now on to the subject of this post: Frankfurt.  We flew from Dallas to London, then on to Frankfurt.  The cross-Atlantic flight was not nearly as long as I remembered.  I didn't get a normal amount of sleep, but it wasn't horrible.  I was however, sitting in a middle seat next to someone with BO (no, it wasn't Johnny).  When we got to Germany, we got our rental car, found the hotel and met up with Johnny's boss, who was coming on the Europe trip with us.  At dinner we talked about what I could do with my time, and I decided to take a taxi into the city and see the older parts.  I had quite a time getting Euros to pay the driver, so I started out with an adventure.  I ended up wandering around, eating lunch in a park, and wandering back to the Roma Platz to get a taxi back.  On my way back, I stumbled upon this amazing cemetery.  I kind of have a thing for cemeteries, especially old ones.  This made the whole day worth it.  It started with this wall:

It wraps all the way around the cemetery.  I was about halfway when I took this picture, so the opposite side is twice this big.  Plus there are the other two that I didn't get a good look at. 

I noticed the squares which have names of Jews killed in the holocaust. 

I thought it was a beautiful memorial for the city to put together, but then I noticed that the wall surrounded a cemetery.  The gate was locked, but I did get pictures.

This was the largest section to the left.  There were smaller, later plots to the right, and a walled-in section.

Close up of the old headstones.

Then I saw this plaque.  I left this picture large, so if you clicked on it you could read it (hopefully).

As to why I haven't been blogging much.  I'm sorry.  January went by quickly.  Johnny had a birthday, and then I caught a stomach bug and was in bed for three days.  I thought I was going to die, but I was too weak to blog a goodbye.  Then I've had four trips to plan- first Johnny was gone for two weeks to Asia before this Europe/Africa trip.  He was home exactly two and a half days between, which means I took care of the details of that and the kids' trip to Utah to the grandparents who watched them while we were gone.  And then we had exactly one week after we got home before we left on a road trip to NC to watch Johnny graduate.  And in that week, The Captain had a birthday.  So we've been busy.  Also we bought a minivan.  And I tried to get some nesting done before I started traveling since I knew my time would be short when we got back.

Anyway, those are my excuses.  Now you can look forward to picture post updates for a few weeks.