Debbie painting

Here's Debbie painting---getting ready to participate in a little art expo here in Saint Albain.

prize vine

after de-vining some of the walls around the château (don't worry, there are still lots of pretty vines left, we just remove the ones that damage the walls) Micah and I ended up with this record breaking 48lb beauty. If any of you would like to try to beat our record, feel free - plenty of vines left for everyone.

misc pictures

thought you'd enjoy some other misc pics from the past few weeks. Debbie and Pam planting flowers in front of the gatehouse - i'll have to get a picture of them now, they look great (but I'll wait for a non-rainy day). The church is on the hill back behind Viré - a few km's from Saint Albain, a great spot for a picnic, overlooking the valley.

micah the singing song book

cleaned out the attic this week - surprisingly, not as many interesting finds as you'd expect, and really, only two van fulls to the dump. We still have a large stack of stuff that needs to be sorted through by the various people who left them in the attic, but overall, we're in much better shape, and ready for a team someday to re-build the chimneys so that we can have fires in the Grand Salle again!

Micah did try on the sweet Psalty the Singing Song book costume that we found (in French of course).

chateau themed background

here's a cool picture of our cherry trees - you can use it for a computer background if you'd like, to remind you of the chateau phone number & website, which I'm sure everyone needs all the time.

full sized version available here (click on the download link over on the right):
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayhocking/MayNewsletter/photo#5205895658397146850

chateau roof work

Marlin wanted to finish some roof repair work that he had started a few years ago, so we replaced some beams, and are hopefully going to finish it up this next week. Here's a short video of us working on it - me and Micah Ceresani (who's here for a month just to help out)

Last month in Indiana

The day after we arrived, was the Congrès - the 1 day conference for all the French GBC's. Marlin cooked sausages, and Sue & Melody put together a great picnic!

Abe & Lisa Wright - at our last small group meeting. Abe was really broken-hearted to see us leave. Even a chocolate dilly bar couldn't stop the sobs.

magnolia tree blooming in our back yard, while our house is being stuccoed.

The last supper. Our last sushi meal with curt & nick

The back of our house, all stuccoed (is that how you spell it?)

Debbie painting storm windows - and a view of our house minus all the stucco

Jay's 29th birthday - it's getting to be a lot of candles huh? (celebrated a little early, since we were actually arriving in France the day before my birthday)

the four siblings

Family photo! Jenny, Jake & Josiah on the left, mom & dad, Debbie and I, Lilly (Joel's fiance), Joel, and John.

4:50pm - arrive at Fort Wayne International Airport - more than two hours before our 7:05pm departure on United. As we walk up to the United Airlines desk, a blond haired woman says "your flight's been cancelled" as she walk away. We've got 8 pieces of luggage, plus our cat, so we knew this was going to be fun.

First off, they tried to get us on a flight with American, leaving at 6:30 - but they couldn't check Nadia - apparently they were hauling dry ice in the cargo hold, and dry ice and cats don't mix well. So they said we'd have to carry her in the cabin - no big deal, except we'd have to pay $80 for the privilege of doing so against our will. Unfortunately, our other options were:

1. Take a flight the next day (not gonna work, our ride once we get to Lyon is going to be pretty busy the next day, and not able to pick us up).

2. Well.... there were no other options.

Did I mention that they also would not give us anything for our trouble? I mean, they wouldn't pay the $80 for the cat in the cabin (even though we were STILL paying the $130 to have her ride in the hold). No free tickets, or anything. I suppose it's not their fault. So we took the American Airlines flight.

Ahh... excess baggage. First thing, I walked up to the desk and said "my tickets are through Luftansa - and they allow 50lbs for your checked luggage, and 70lbs for excess bags" - and his response was "We'll honor Luftansa's baggage policies, since you're transferring from them.

He then proceeded to charge me $200 extra for overweight bags. "hang on, didn't you just say you'd honor Luftansa's baggage policy?".

"yes, and I'm charging you $127 for each of the excess bags, and $50 for the four overweight ones"

Luckily, I had thought to print out Luftansa's baggage policy. I handed it over the counter to him, pointing out the section I had highlighted: "An ADDITIONAL pice of baggage weighing no more than 70lbs and measuring no more than 158cm - cost:$127"

He tried to argue his way out of it for over 30 minutes. 30 minutes. He told me that Luftansa charged $50 for ANY piece over 50lbs, but less than 70lbs. It's pretty hard to get that out of the policy I had printed out, but he tried his best. Finally I convinced him to call Luftansa. Actually, I THOUGHT I had convinced him to call Luftansa, but actually he just called a co-worker in Chicago, who sided with him. When I said "I can't believe that - I actually called Luftansa to confirm this!" he admitted "well, I didn't actually call the Luftansa desk". Another round of arguments, with me forcing him to read my printed out policy, and he finally actually called Luftansa. Putting down the phone, looking at his keyboard, he mumbled "you were right".

Case closed, we handed over our luggage, and with 15 minutes remaining before we were to board, we entered security. Both of us pulling roll-on carry-ons, and "personal items" that pushed the limit of that category of luggage (Debbie's "purse" actually outsized several carry-ons, but probably still smaller than our co-worker Pam Crane's purse - which I'm pretty sure contains everything she needs for a week long vacation in the Alps - including skis). But with a little smirk, they went ahead and x-rayed all our stuff... Interestingly, I think this is a new record for number of bins required. We used 7 bins, plus our two carry-ons. I'm carrying two laptops, which each get their own bin, and Debbie's carrying another. Plus a bin each for our "Personal item", and another bin each for coat (yes, we're wearing coats, it's free to take whatever you're wearing (debbie has two sweaters and a jacket) and shoes (we're both wearing boots, since they're heavy we didn't want them in checked luggage). Oh, and we had Nadia with us now, who can't go through the x-ray machine, so we have to take her out of her carrier, and send it through by itself.

Luckily, nothing crazy happened, and she didn't escape. Before we left for the airport she had been hiding under the front porch, somehow she knew we were planning to torture her. So anyway, I was worried about taking her out of the carrier.

As we walked through to the other side, to pick up our bags on the other side of the scanner we heard the dreaded words "You have been selected for a random blah blah blah...". Yeah. Awesome. 12 minutes until departure (not boarding, departure) and they want to search all our bags. Lucky for us, it's pretty quick, unless you have electronics in your bags, in which case they have to swab them all and send the swabs through a machine. As you know, I never carry electronics. Oh wait. 18 swabs later, we were on our way, with 2 minutes remaining. Luckily, the flight was delayed 10 min, so we were gold, we walked up right as they were boarding.

Then we get on the plane. We are the next to last seat - 17 b & c. (it's a small plane). Nadia's supposed to go under the seat. Hmmm... this cat carrier was designed for checked pets, not carry-on. Oh well, the seat next to us is empty, so I set here there. That lasted about 1 minute, until the flight attendant dude came back. "You'll have to put the cat under the seat in front of you sir."

I tried to explain that it wouldn't fit, I even demonstrated (she fit on the floor, but not under the seat) - he looked off over my head and started in:

"FAA regulation blah blah blah requires all pet carriers to fit completely under the seat in front of you blah blah blah."

When he finished, and looked back down at me, I asked "So what do you want me to do".

After we went through the whole story of why I couldn't check the cat, because of the dry ice they were hauling (I thought about offering to put the dry ice under the seat in front of me, but didn't think he was in the joking mood) he decided that some other airline employee had already given me the required grief, and there was none left to get out of me, so he agreed to leave the cat on the floor (but not before pointing out 2 or 3 times how it was "so close" and the cat "almost fit! just a couple inches too tall". I wasn't sure if he was suggesting we hacksaw down the cat cage to fit, or if he was just pointing out repeatedly how we had failed in our choice of cat carriers for the cabin).

The best part about all of this, is that when we arrived in Chicago, we had to actually go out through security, find the Luftansa desk, check the cat in (that took 30min - apparently the cat was supposed to have been checked in Fort Wayne, and the fact that we still had it in our hands was really screwing up their system) then go back through security - this time though, we weren't the lucky winners of a special security check, and our flight was pretty uneventful from then on.


We're here in Saint Albain now, and I'll write more later :)

The receiving of the keys - in the same place where Marlin received the keys over 23 years ago, he handed them over to me.