Vacation Sunday part 1: Mini Chef

Today was a bit of an extra day.  We built it in in case flights went very south and so that we could get used to the time change before our tour on Monday.

We hadn't realized that we needed to reserve a time for breakfast, so we ended up with a 7:30 breakfast.  Not ideal, but we did schedule lunch for 11 so it was probably good too.  The buffet was great!  It had some interesting flavors (pear banana yogurt, rhubarb juice, currant juice) along with enough normal things.

After breakfast several of us went back to sleep.  I know that's not really what you're supposed to do when there's a time change, but at the same time we didn't have any plans and no one had slept well on the planes.  We eventually got up and were about to start walking to LEGO house and it started to rain.  We went by taxi instead.

Lunch at LEGO house was very nice!  We're actually going to eat there again - we didn't realize that when we booked these reservations.  The robots are fun, the story behind the mini figures making our lunches is fun, and the food was good.  The kids got a mini figure chef as part of their lunch and Isaac asked if these were the retired mini figures, now sent home to be played with.  Unfortunately, that isn't the case.  They were on dishwashing duty today and didn't want to dishwash because they have tiny hands, so their punishment was to be sent home with kids.

The robots that hand out the meals!  The mini chefs make the meals in the back, then they come down the track and the robots push them out to you.

Ordering drinks.  This part was pretty normal.

Ordering food.  You select four bricks where the color and shape corresponds to the food you want.  It can be put together any way (as long as it's flat) and then gets scanned.  The scanned result is shown moving to the kitchen so the mini-chefs know what to make.

Picking up food.

All of us!

There were so many lovely bouquets around.  I was a bit envious.

Ben noticed how they displayed some of the small flower sets and we both really like it.  We looked for similar boxes to use at home instead of the current shelves, but rectangle shelves don't seem to exist.

A model of how the kitchen looks. :)

It was still raining and our next activity was an outside one, so we just hung around the entry of LEGO house for a bit.  We looked in the gift store and at several of the models.  The rain seemed to let up, so we were off.

These bricks called out to the kids every time we went by them.

Wednesday: obstacle course

Mrs. Galli invited Joshua and some friends to use the obstacle course at the dojang today.  It was a perfect day because the whole week has been too hot to do anything outside, so they were still able to run around without getting too hot.

Our plans for tomorrow were canceled.  It might be a good thing because it was outside at a playground and we'd need to get out of the house rather early so that it was only hot and and not crazy hot.  However, this means that we pretty much have boring-for-Joshua plans tomorrow.

Tuesday: play

Joshua and I had another full day today.

We had some errands and went to a play at Hope College.  (The play was good, but had a bit more singing than either of us were expecting.  Some singing is ok, but a few fewer songs would have been nice. we both enjoyed the fun songs more.)

I started taping the walls in the basement for painting.  We played Chinese checkers.  I made steak via sous vide (since I need to return it tomorrow).  It was good, but there were a few improvements that could be made.  Joshua made mashed potatoes as his vegetable for the week.

Monday: exciting day!

It was an excellent day, even though Isaac was gone.

We'll start with Isaac.  I received several pictures throughout the day but only saw him in two - and one of those he was just kind of in the background.  I'm not sure how he managed to hide so well.

Joshua and I had a productive morning.  We did 30 minutes work/ 30 minutes fun on repeat.  For our fun part we were making a door in Isaac's bedroom door.  It was surprising how quickly our Duplos disappeared as part of this project.

For one of our work segments we worked on the basement walls.  We finished taking things off the wall and fixing the holes.  Joshua and Tornado were both intrigued by the hole under the steps.

Friends came over in the afternoon - Joshua played in the lake for several hours and I finished a puzzle with Elizabeth that we've been working on for quite a while.  We both thought that this would be a fun and pretty easy puzzle.  It was a fun puzzle, but not an easy one!  We finished it up outside to keep a better eye on the kids.

For dinner I had borrowed a sous vide machine from the library, so I used that with some chicken.  It was delicious!  I don't think I've made chicken that good...ever.  Even Joshua said it was good and ate all of his chicken which is rather amazing.

Sunday: send off

Isaac left on a mission trip today!  We don't expect to have any direct contact with him, but will have access to pictures and a daily mass email.  They arrived safely!

Vacation Friday and Saturday (June 5-6): travel

 I was a bit of a nervous wreck leading up to vacation.  Thunderstorms were predicted to roll through the area right around the time that we were going to leave and I'm a bad pre-traveler.  Things were spotty all during the day and eventually we arrived at the airport.  (Besides worry about the weather, leaving in the evening is really nice!  It gave us the whole day to finish up packing and clean the house before leaving.)

Anyway, Ben had noticed that there was an earlier trip to Detroit and managed to get us on that one!  It was slightly delayed, but not by much, and we got out of Grand Rapids easily.  There was a bit of confusion as the gate agent changed our standby seats so that we were still all sitting together, which changed some other peoples' seats that had printed tickets, and it was a bit of a fiasco.  But we got out before the weather and landed in Detroit and my stress level immediately went back to normal.

We got to Detroit with plenty of time, so after a sit down dinner the kids and I rode the tram.  We rode a full loop of one tram.  Then realized that the other tram curved at the central station so we rode a full loop on that tram.  As Isaac then said, "I remember these being more fun."

The plane took a bit to clean, so we were once again delayed.  We were all so tired - it was after 10:30 and it had been a long day.  We eventually got on the plane.  Isaac and I rested right away, but I didn't sleep - my legs kept having issues.  They served a dinner (which Isaac ate some of - everyone else declined) and finally turned off the lights.  I managed to sleep for a bit under four hours, although it was rather interrupted sleep as Isaac and I kept moving around.  Poor Ben didn't sleep at all.

We still got to Amsterdam around the expected time, so we had plenty of time to make it through passport control.  This ended up being a rather good thing, because they are rolling out the new EES system and well, I'm not sure it was working at all.  I did not get fingerprinted.  Also, the line started out moving pretty well, and when we were two back-and-forths away it ground to a halt.  And then moved very, very slowly.  By this time we could see what was going on and there was a combination: several agents left on break, the officers were trying to get the shorter layover people through first, and some general confusion.  At one point the main line had no customs agents looking at our passports - all the agents were either doing the short layover or diplomatic passengers.  This is fine until it isn't - there were several families around us that had been ok on time until that point, but then they were so far ahead in the line that they got ignored...but our line wasn't moving.  I felt rather stressed for them, but we had time.  All in all, it took us 1.5hours to make it through.

Then we found some food!  Isaac and Joshua got what they thought were yogurt parfaits, but it was more of a cheesecake.  Joshua especially found this hilarious that his lunch was cheesecake.  Isaac was in rough shape before eating...I got back to our table after filling the water bottles to find Isaac just sitting there.  He had been on a mission to find spoons.

Amanda: did you find spoons?
Isaac: no. I'm hoping dad will come with some
Amanda: did you talk to Dad?
Isaac: I couldn't find him.

So, in summary, I went to find the spoons because Isaac's brain wasn't working.

We found our gate for our last flight and, surprise surprise, it was delayed too.  Again, not by much, but Ben's curse was active.  Since we had about two hours, Joshua and I went out to explore.  This is one of my favorite things to do with Joshua - he's always up for walking around new places to see what there is to see.  We went to concourse D, which was actually rather interesting.  You had to go up stairs to get to the concourse and there was also sky lounge 25.  If you went up more stairs you found sky lounges 26 and 27, one of which let you go on the roof.  The roof wasn't overly nice - just concrete squares - but there were some picnic tables and an airplane on display.  We also found some nice lounge chairs that we could have used, but they were rather busy.  We went up some other escalators and found a whole additional food court!  On our way back we went down some escalators to use some bathrooms.  They were the standard bathrooms in the airport, but the odd thing was that the door handles looked like that should turn but were really just push/pull type.  I and another woman both bonded over having issues, only to find out that Ben had similar issues at a different bathroom unit.

We finally got to board and we loaded through the back of the plane.  I feel like I've done this once or twice, but it ended up being a very common thing in Europe.

Denmark is flatter and more full of farms than I imagine in my mind.

We got to our hotel around 6:30pm (ish) local time.  Our first hotel had a ramp for luggage, but it was a rather steep ramp and didn't work all that well.

Then we went over to Lalandia, a waterpark thing like Great Wolf Lodge, to just check it out and get dinner.  On the way, we found a playline on the sidewalk!  There were dots all along the edge and sometimes they were close together and sometimes they were farther apart.  Both kids enjoyed jumping/walking on them.

We walked around a bit, looked in the little grocery store, and ordered some pizza.  I also picked up some strawberries from the store and they were delicious.  On our way back we stopped at the outdoor exercise spot near our hotel.  The weather was nice and the kids had a ton of energy to burn.

And that was the end of the day!  Everyone was ready for bed.  Ben fell asleep first around 9pm with Isaac and Joshua close behind.  I took a shower and then fell asleep easily.

Saturday: Cheryl's birthday

After dinner to celebrate Cheryl's birthday, we went home for cake and presents.  That was normal - nice to be with family and almost everyone was there.

Then a few boxes of old papers were brought out.  For Ben, it was mostly boring stuff...some transcripts, some awards, some information for entering Hope.  For Travis, it also included a lot of elementary through high school items.  Isaac couldn't stop laughing over one of the books that he had written:

While this isn't quite the correct words, here they are as best we could remember: "The space ship goes up into space.  And all of a sudden.  / Bullets was shooting at the spaceship.  Everybody died. Nobody was controlling./down down down. All of a sudden.  The spaceship crashed."