European Vacation

Annie and I enjoyed a week long trip to Europe. We visited France, England and Holland in a hurried eight days. I had a couple of days of business meeting in the London area and I talked Annie into joining me for the trip. We had a great time. I found out that luggage was over rated. Air France lost my luggage the first day and finally returned it to me in Amsterdam one week later - the night before we flew home. I was able to buy a few items and then spent many evenings doing laundry in either the sink or the tub of our hotel room. Such fun. Annie's suitcase was also lost for our stay in France but was waiting for us at Charles De Gaul before our flight to London. We were both very disappointed that I didn't have my suitcase. I was quite impressive at my meetings in London wearing jeans, a complimentary Air France t-shirt and my thin golf jacket (which I kept on for my meetings).
An early start in Paris. After staying for one night at the Paris Hilton, we are off to Hertz to pick up a car for the drive to Normandy - the highlight of the trip for me. It was so awesome, I'm going to put up another post on that part of the trip.

Out for an evening walk in London. Here we are on the pedestrian bridge over the River Thames between Embankment and Waterloo stations. If you look close you can see Big Ben over my left shoulder and the London Eye (aka Millennium Wheel) over Annie's right shoulder

Next Stop was Amsterdam. Here is Anne Frank's house viewed from our canal cruise. From her secret room in the attic, Anne listened to the radio with news of the Allied landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944. Her hopes of returning to school in the fall were soon crushed as she and her family were found and sent to concentration camps.

Venice of the North

I think I may have worked with these brick layers....

The Van Gogh museum was closed when we got there so the best we could do was have me poise in front of this nearby shop selling prints. You may recognize my outfit from the photo in London three days earlier.....

Tulips everywhere - Here is Annie inside the greenhouse at Keukenhof. Normally tulips can be found in bloom from mid-April through the end of May. This year due to global warming, winter lasted longer than normal so the tulips are a little late, but we found plenty in bloom during our visit on April 17.

Wind mills were not every where. We spent most of an afternoon looking for windmills and castles but with limited success. We were not very happy with the Avis GPS (tom tom). The Hertz 'Neverlost' GPS we used in France was far superior.

the rutledge's trip to the carolinas

We had a great trip back to North and South Carolina. We spent the first 3 days in Charleston, SC. We thought Charleston was really beautiful, the streets were narrow so driving was a little intense, but we loved walking around downtown and seeing the sights. On the way back up to NC, we thought we would drive up the coast and have lunch in Myrtle Beach. Randomly we got two flat tires (when I say flat, I mean really flat, not just low, but undriveable flat). It was lucky that were in a little town and that Pizza Hut was nearby, because we waited for three and a half hours for the rental company to bring us a new car. We spent the next few days in North Carolina, JD made sure we ate well, probably not healthy, but well. A few other random events from the trip --
**Apparently Eliza can gleek? She displayed this amazing talent while eating some pears.
**JD wants to be a Cameron Crazy. If he was a DUKE student he would be out there camping out to get tickets, and painting his body blue for the games.
**Seriously though, how on earth do people get around on the east coast when all you can see is trees? I had no idea which direction we were going.
It was a lot of fun. Hope to go back someday soon.