We're back!

Wow, four months has gone by without an update?  Seems unbelievable, but perhaps the old saying is true; time flies when you are having fun!  We have so much to catch up on since we last posted.  Our friend Dustin came to visit us in February and he was our first visitor from back home.  While he was here, we traveled to Luzern, the Alps, and Sorrento, Italy, all of which were amazing adventures.  After D left town, we moved into our very own place!  We found a great place only a two-minute walk from the Rhein and a 10 minute walk to the institute.  We are really liking our new pad and we hope to never have to move again while we are here!  Just after moving in to the new apartment, we made our first trip back to the States.  It was a whirlwind adventure filled with friends and family, a wedding for V's sister Elaine, and a graduation party for Jon's sister Ashley.  We brought two empty suitcases with us and filled them with inexpensive American merchandise.  On the flight back to Basel, we realized how much we had missed it.  Eight months in and this place is really starting to feel like home. 

After getting back to Basel, we finished settling in to the new flat and prepared ourselves for our second set of visitors, Phil and Kristina!  We had a great long weekend with them, including a day trip to the southern edge of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest).  That pretty much summarizes the last four months of our life in a nutshell.  There will be many more posts to come about some of these events, and there will be a lot more pictures, as we know that is what is juiciest about this blog.  For now, we shall placate you with last weekend's bicycle ride through the Alsace region, just across the French border from here.

Here is a link to some info on the Alsace region, in case you are interested.  It was historically a Germanic region, but it has remained a part of France for the last few centuries.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsace

We set out with our Austrian friend Elizabeth, who is a cycling enthusiast to the max!

The intent of our bike ride was to reach an annual market in the Alsace, where we would buy much local cheese and wine.  It turns out however, that the word for market in French is the same as for march (i.e. parade), you just need to know about the accent.  Whoops!  It was pretty hilarious though, and we ended up just riding to St. Loius, where we had a nice lunch at a cafe, and then went to a fromagerie, where we proceeded to buy five different types of stinky cheese and some really good wine too.

The beautiful Alsace region.

On the road again! It felt so good to be back touring on bikes again!  Our good friends Phillip and Katrin lent Jon a bicycle to use (Dustin was kind enough to bring V's over on the plane!) and we are hoping to have many more cycling adventures.

And this is how we spend a lot of our time now:

We love living by the river!  V bought Jon a BBQ for our 5th anniversary, so now we can even cook down by the river too!

Well, sorry it took so long to get back to this blogging thing, but we are going to try and be better about it again.  We hope this post finds all of you well and happy, you can rest assured that we are!

Mit Liebe,

Die EuroFadoks