Back in our second home - Slovakia!

The journey was long and complicated, but we're back!  Since the Des Moines to Chicago  flight was definitely the problem, we canceled that leg of the trip, rented a car, and drove to O'Hare on Tuesday.  Unfortunately, we spent 7 hours at the airport because of delays for our London flight.  (Their crazy excuses = #1: because of the ice, they had to find bigger machinery to get the plane out of the hanger.  #2: Then they announced that one of the pilots was illegal, which we assume means not enough rest between flights, so they had to wait for another one to come.  Brother!!!)  So, then we missed our flight from London to Vienna completely.  Which meant that we also missed the train from Bratislava so sat around there for another 4 hours.  We finally caught an 11:40 p.m. train which arrived back in Liptovsky Mikuláš just before 4:00 a.m.  After about 2 hours of sleep, we got up and went to school.  It was great seeing everyone again, but we were a little fatigued after spending most of 2 days and nights traveling!!  We slept 12 hours straight Thursday night.  And another 12 on Friday night!   

It has been a productive weekend though.

• Finally got the suitcases unpacked, and everything organized & put away
• Took down and packed away all the Christmas decorations
• Did 4 loads of laundry (remember, our machine is really small here!)
• Did some badly needed sewing/mending - a skirt hem, some rips in curtains, etc.  
• Wrote some thank-you notes
• Cleaned and scrubbed the kitchen
• Actually cooked a full meal for Sunday lunch (not much cooking for the past few weeks!)
• Put new kids' photos in frames for our desks at school
• Slept --- a lot!!   :-)  

So, hopefully this explains the lack of photos for this post.  Sorry --- I know some of you only look at pictures, so you've skipped everything so far --- blah, blah, blah!!!   LOL!!  

Here's the one and only photo --- the new quilt and pillow shams for the bed in our flat.  The other Riverside quilt we brought over here last year was really a single, and it was exactly as big as the mattress with no overhang, but it was O.K.   This is one we bought at the Riverside Quilt Auction this past August, while shopping for Christmas gifts to bring back to Slovakia.  During the auction, I couldn't figure out why nobody was even making an opening bid for such a nice, big, pretty quilt, with shams!  So I nodded to open, and no one else bid at all after that, so this one was soon mine at a bargain price.  Afterwards, I discovered what the other bidders evidently already knew, that it's not a hand-made quilt, but rather a manufactured one, complete with tags, that someone had donated to the auction.  Since we didn't want to give away a store-bought quilt as a gift, we brought it over to use here ourselves, and it's perfect!!

And now there will be no tussles for covers.     :-)