1: Family Europe trip

I'm currently sitting on the ferry to Vancouver. We left the house around 11am today, in a bit of a scramble as always; five minutes before we left, the sound of vacuuming was still omnipresent and I was wiping down the last of the Red Marvel from the bathtub. I managed to snap a couple pictures before we left, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to save this rare moment. That moment of course being the split second when our house was clean and the floors visible… All five of us agree that we would very much like to keep it this way. Or at least 3/4 this clean. Ok, maybe 2/3 as clean. But I hope we will manage to maintain it when we get back.
So far the beginning of this trip has been a bit rushed. I'm glad we have the buffer of the ferry between home and the airport, it's time to relax (and to write some words for this blog). I scraped my knee a bit on the way across the parking lot from the van to the foot passenger ticket place, injury count: 1. Thanks shoelaces. I love you too.
I've had the same song in my head since I woke up (and yesterday as well): Mama Said by Lukas Graham. I don't even own that song, I just played it from YouTube twice. And it's good, but I'm worried that having it stuck in my head for 48 hours will make it overplayed and I'll stop liking it…
My brothers are currently busy putting their feet on the seats facing them and saying "we're making a bridge, now get over it". My parents are discussing the postal system of England and how some houses just don't have numbers, instead just names like "Upper Goongillings" or in a village "near" another bigger one. Now Tobin is crawling under our legs, asking to be saved. As Jeff put it "he wants the drama of a near-rescue". We've successfully made someone move who was trying to read in book a couple seats over. So basically we're seeing what family dynamics emerge when there's no wifi.
Don't count on this much detail for the entire month-long trip. Likely there will be the most detail in my posts when nothing is happening, because I will be bored and have time to write. Then when we go and do a mountain coaster, I'll describe the entire outing in two sentences.

Now sitting just outside of security at Vancouver airport. We've repacked our bags a bit so now we only have four big bags to check instead of five. Most of that is camping stuff so I'd say we're doing pretty well. There are two girls riding their rolling suitcases (scootcases- thanks Julias) down the small incline in front of us. It's very cute and makes me want to have a rolling suitcase to ride down the tiled floor as well… I filmed them surreptitiously. And they are now on my snapchat as well.

We actually managed to find some gluten free fast food here- Vietnamese food place. Lise and I got soup with rice noodles and beef and veggies, and it was very good! Five stars. Tobin got Wendy's. It's very nice travelling with a small group and no children under 9, the only blood sugar emergency so far was when Tobin's burger had onions and pickles on it and the crying was very close… But we made him have some Fruitopia and it was ok. We got him a new burger.

We're about a third of the way to London. I've just read about half of The Night Circus on my iPad. It's a wonderful book, I can't get enough of it. I had to stop because my eyes were getting tired. It makes me want to write, even though I'm sure I could never create a story as artfully woven together as the story of Le Cirque des Rêves. It's the kind of book you come away from with an increased awareness, something that settles at the back of your skull and turns you away from the new Hollywood releases on the screen and turns you toward the expanding waters of the Hudson Bay as they glow red in the shrouded sun over the horizon beneath you.
As much as I love comedy, there will always be a special place in my heart for the artfully dramatic or mysterious.
I've eaten my chocolate bar already; the one I was trying to make last for the entire flight. Local time in London: 5:56am. I'm starting to think about sleep.
That book makes me want to be productive and make art. I'm sure that being on a plane, an experience I don't often encounter, can provide some sort of unique opportunity that I'm just not picking up on… Maybe someone smarter than myself can figure it out. In any case I don't have a lemon so that game is out of the question.
Alright, I think I'll just rest my head on the side of my seat and stare fixedly out over the wing for a bit. Listen to music and muse upon my future and the ones I love…

London airport. It's freaking huge. Took us about an hour to get situated at our proper terminal, and even then we're just sitting on the floor next to a wall because there are no seats available. It's so busy. There are about 17 wifi networks present, none of which I can connect to. The official heathrow one is having issues. Probably because of network traffic, judging by the number of phones I see around me right now. So I'm content to be offline for awhile longer.
I just bought some Kettle chips at a store here, they are exactly the same but the packaging is different. Looks like they're trying to be more classy when they are on European shelves. Back on the west coast it's all about rusticness, but here it's about Windows 10-style blankness apparently.
I'm surprisingly not too tired. I slept maybe two or three hours on the plane, so I'm not completely sleep deprived. I mean, I totally am completely sleep deprived, but I have a tiny bit of sleep I can cling to.
I finished half of The Night Circus on the plane, and had time to watch the first three episodes of season two of Schitt's Creek. It's a CBC comedy show that I saw the first season of on Netflix (when we still had it) and I really like it. The people making it are a father-son duo who actually play a father-son duo on screen do that works out. If you listen to them in interviews, it seems like they're really down to earth. Basically they wanted to write a comedy show, so they did, and CBC picked it up and now it's a whole thing. I don't think their budget is super huge either which makes me happy because it's a really good show; a good example that you can do a lot with a little if you're clever enough.
Airports, especially sprawling city-sized ones, have the kfeeling of an alternate world in stasis. Any feeling of profoundness I had briefly on the plane has been washed away in a stream of loud Chinese, white fluorescents, fifteen-foot lipstick ads, and millions of grey-faced walking legs of people-shells.

Now we're in Geneva. Local time: 7:16pm. Time in Victoria: 10:16am Monday. We left Sunday morning. So I guess we've been in transit for about 24 hours. I got some sleep I guess. We're holding it together, no major breakdowns yet.
It's kinda fun to hear French spoken around me again. I wonder what the prevalent language is in Bern (where our house swap is).
Lise and Jeff are on a hunt for groceries, as we were told by our house swappers that most of the stores in Switzerland are closed today, must be some holiday or something. So they're walking 500m a cross the airport (and joint train station apparently) to an open food store. Then we're hauling us and our four big checked bags to the car rental place.
Ok they're back. Off we go.

It's 9:23pm in Switzerland and we've figured out enough about how our really really fancy rental Mercedes works to program in the destination of Bern on the sat-nav. Tobin in leaning on my shoulder and trying to sleep. There's a lot of sweat. We just passed IKEA. I'm starting to feel my mental capacities failing due to lack of sleep, and I think the same is true for everyone else. Nothing of what we say is making sense anymore. Jeff is figuring out cruise control. Lise and I tried to figure out music from the iPod to play on the car but it's too hard. We keep hitting dead ends of German menus and the car manual is in German and Lise can't get enough meaning out of it. So I'll just look it up when we get to wifi.
We are going right through Yverdon-les-bains on our way to Bern, so that's cool. We can think of Cabin Pressure as we drive by.
I ripped the sky train ticket I kept from Vancouver apart and found a small circuit of metal inside it. So that's cool.
"Please keep right in 2km" thanks sat-nav.
Lise says our goal for tomorrow is find a grocery store and wash out the water of the turtle. Apparently there's a turtle we need to look after while we stay in Bern. And apparently it really likes snails from the garden.
Tobin is now fast asleep on my arm.
The moon is very pretty. The sky is pink.

It's 10:40pm in Switzerland. I've fallen asleep a couple times in the back of the car. We got some sort of a deal on this car, not sure the details but for some reason they needed to rent this swanky car to us or another group or else risk not renting to one of us, so we're paying about 600 dollars less than the posted price to rent this for two weeks.
Apparently we'll get there in twenty minutes. I don't know how we're going to unload, most of us are sleeping right now.
The way I could tell that I fell asleep was that I was listening to music, then suddenly realized I was halfway through a song but didn't remember the beginning, so I looked at the past couple songs and I didn't remember hearing any of them. So that's a good indicator.
39 hours mostly awake.

We're at the house. I killed a spider and fed the cat (they have a cat! It's small and black). This is definitely the German-speaking part of Switzerland, everything is in German. They didn't say the name of the cat, a bit disappointed. But still there's a cat so I'm still happy. The house is four floors, garage at the top. It's on a steep incline right next to a river. It's midnight right now but I would imagine the view is astounding. I'll take pictures tomorrow. There are also so many cool things (plants, decks, fish, garage, skylight windows, possible former bomb shelter, general construction) about this house but I don't have the mental capacity or the time to chronicle them right now. I'll devote tomorrow for pictures and descriptions of the house, I don't think I'll be doing much else. We drove over a really nice really old-looking covered bridge on the way here, one-way traffic only. I'm very much looking forward to exploring and seeing the rest of this house and gardens and the river tomorrow in the daylight.
I had some Lyoner sausage and nuts and gruyere cheese (same stuff we have back home only this time it's not import end-it's local) and some hazelnut chocolate that they left for us. Now I connect to wifi and post this and fall into bed.