As I said in a few posts back, I am working on uploading all of our old photos to Flickr and in doing so, memories come flooding back. I’m going to try to document some parts of our adventures in England and abroad during that time by linking to some of these photos.

Mike and I were married nearly 7 years ago in May 2002. Mike was working at IBM as he is now and I was working at Mayo Clinic, also where I am now. About a month after our wedding, an opportunity came to Mike at his job that we could not refuse. Betsy Baartman, Mike’s manager at the time and still a dear friend of ours, presented Mike with the chance to work in Hursley, England for a year as part of an exchange of knowledge between the two locations. Betsy told Mike about this possible trip and asked him to go home and see what I thought of it. Mike told her right then that he didn’t need to ask me, he knew my answer (YES! YES YES!), but we still discussed it that evening. We were still living in our 2 bedroom apartment, so we didn’t have a house to sell or maintain while we were gone. We didn’t yet have any children. My job was expendable. We had NO reason to say no. The time from June until mid-August was insanity for us. IBM kept going back and forth over whether or not to send us. Ironically enough at that time another manager told Mike that “nothing was for sure until you were on that plane headed to England.” We had no idea exactly how true that was until we were at the rehearsal for our friend Tina’s wedding in the Twin Cities and Mike received a call on our cellphone from Betsy. She told him that the trip had been cancelled by some idiot executive and that we should come back to Rochester on Sunday instead of flying out to England. We had moved out of our apartment and put everything into a storage facility. I had sold my car and Mike’s was being stored. We had nowhere to live and nothing to drive. After the wedding Mike’s parents drove us back to Rochester where Betsy had reserved us a suite at a hotel and a rental car. She also stocked the room with goodies and a much needed bottle of wine. I remember being absolutely stunned by the whole situation. Here we were all ready to fly to England Sunday morning, but instead we were back in Rochester living in a hotel! It was all so surreal. On Monday Mike went into work and of course everyone was shocked to see him there. Behind the scenes Betsy and others were working to get the idiot executive’s decision reversed. By Wednesday they had succeeded, Mike and I repurchased airline tickets, turned OFF our cellphone and we flew out to London immediately!

We arrived in London very early in the morning and had a car drive us to Winchester where we had booked a hotel room for the time being until we could find a house to rent. The Wessex Hotel was our home for about 4 weeks.

We made friends with the staff, ordered an unbelievable amount of room service, ate out at every single restaurant in town and were awakened by the sound of the Winchester Cathedral’s bells every weekend morning. It was difficult living in a hotel where housekeeping disrupted my every morning and where we had no real place to just hang out other than our “bedroom.” Our first day in Winchester was probably an indication of how things were to go for us for the entire year to come. We were starving and totally unfamiliar with not only the town, but also with England in general. We walked down the High Street and the only recognizable name we could find was Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut – Americana – something familiar? Oh no! We walked in and sat down at an open table. Minutes later we were being reprimanded for not being seated by the hostess. Day one and we were already sticking out like sore thumbs!

This was our kitchen while we lived in England 6 years ago. SIX years ago. Wow. That house was such a dump, but it holds very precious memories for us and I will always love it for that. We were once told by a repairman that the "range" in this picture was so old that its twin is in a museum. He wasn't kidding. Before we moved out of that house, I cleaned behind and under the stove, which had not been done in probably as long as that appliance existed. It was disgusting. The washing machine in this kitchen - yes, washing machines are commonly in the kitchen in England - worked for maybe half of the time that we lived in the house. The woman who owned this house was completely disinterested in spending money on getting anything fixed, so we often had to wait weeks and fight with the rental agency for things to be repaired. Behind the kitchen is a small sunroom with a beautiful wood floor. As it is known to do in England, it rained a lot the first few days we were in the house and that wood floor was destroyed by leaking water. Sadly, the room was unusable for the duration of our stay. Living there was quite an adventure.

Anyway, I was looking through our England-related photos on our old Webshots sites today and was very frustrated to find that you cannot download photos from Webshots into anything other than their software. Well, that is just got good enough for me! So, I decided to start a new project. I am going to move all of our old photos onto Flickr with all of our newer photos. That way everything is contained in the same place. Heck, we pay for Flickr and have unlimited storage, so why not use it?!? So although it may take me days and days, I am going to be slowly adding these photos to Flickr. That means that when you see a bunch of photos of the Eiffel Tower on our main flickr page, it isn't that we've suddenly whisked ourselves off to Paris - we are just adding the photos from 2002-2003.

Maybe I'll even post some here with some stories about our travels. I promise it will be better than that one time that your Uncle made you watch the slideshow of his family's Smokey Mountain vacation.

We're baaaack...

The Schmitts are back in the USA! We had a great time in England!! We have had some photos posted on our flickr site for a couple of days already, so go check them out.

Here is a not-so-brief synopsis of our trip:
We flew out of Minneapolis on Monday (2/12) to Chicago where we caught a flight that just managed to get out of O'Hare before the big snowstorm hit. The flight to London was long and uneventful. Benjamin did really well during the flight, sleeping a bunch and watching some of his movies. When we landed in London, I realized that I had left Benjamin's passport on the plane and went through a huge ordeal to get it back so that we could be processed through passport control. Needless to say, we were happy to finally meet up with Roland who helped us carry our luggage by tube to the flat that he shares with Cicely and a roommate. We arrived at the flat around 3pm on Tuesday. Benjamin and I desperately needed naps and so we slept for a couple of hours. Next the four of us went down to the pub where we had a drink and FINALLY got to meet Cicely! After enjoying the pub, we went back to the flat for some Indian takeaway, which both Mike and I had been craving for YEARS! Yum.

On Wednesday, both Roland and Cicely had to work, so we were on our own. We decided to go to Harrods to shop around and visit a special guitar exhibit at the store. We had planned on going to the London Aquarium after that, but since we were having so much fun wandering around the toy and kitchen sections of Harrods, we never did. Then we met Roland and Cicely at Rainforest Cafe where we had a very nice Valentine's Day Dinner.

Thursday we traveled by train to Winchester, where we once lived. I had made arrangements for us to stay at a studio B&B, which was above the garage of a very lovely home where the owners lived. This allowed Benjamin to run about and be as loud and he wanted to be without disturbing anyone. The owners were even nice enough to give us a portable crib and toys for Benjamin! We met an old friend at Ask, one of our favorite restaurants, for dinner and then walked down to our favorite pub. Benjamin loved the Black Boy Pub, which is decorated in a very eclectic style, including a stuffed "doggie" on the floor. Benjamin and I left Mike to enjoy his friends while we went back to the B&B to get some sleep. The next day we had our full English breakfast and then walked into the city center to see the sights. Benjamin had fun playing at the park near the Mayor's house and we were able to walk around the Cathedral, where I even saw one of my old co-workers (who remembered me!!). We had lunch at a pub and walked up to our old house, which was EXACTLY the same as we left it. That evening, after taking the train back to London, Cicely made us some tasty lasagna, which allowed us to stay home and get some much-needed relaxation.

On Saturday Cicely and Roland accompanied us to Cambridge where we met Cicely's Mom for lunch and did some sightseeing of the colleges and river area. After spending a nice day being guided around the city, we took the train back to London and had dinner at Giraffe, a very cool restaurant that we really loved.

After taking some pictures at key London landmarks, we visited Greenwich on Sunday, where the Cutty Sark is usually docked, but the ship is currently under repair. Roland, Mike and Benjamin trekked up to the Royal Observatory to see the Prime Meridian while Cicely and I did some shopping. We also walked through the Maritime museum, had Sunday lunch at a pub and ate some yummy crepes from a street vendor. We headed back to the flat after a full day of sightseeing to pack up our bags and relax before our early morning departure. Cicely very graciously helped us with our luggage and kept us from getting stressed out about traveling on our trip back to the airport, even though it was her day off. The flight from the UK was about 2 hours longer than the flight to the UK, so it took some real strength to make it the whole flight. By the time we landed in Chicago and departed to Minneapolis, we were all on edge. Jen picked us up at the airport Monday evening and took us back to the house for some yummy Chinese food and then we headed back to Rochester. We were all sound asleep by 8:00pm and up again this morning at 6:00am feeling unexpectedly refreshed!! I’m sure it will be an early evening again for all of us!

All in all, we had an excellent vacation and really loved spending time with Roland and Cicely. We were able to experience things we loved about the country all over again and even discovered some new things. We also accomplished something we have always dreamed of doing: traveling overseas with our children. It wasn’t always easy, but in the end, it was completely worth it. We can’t wait for Benjamin to be able to look back at the pictures and know that he was able to fly to another country before he even turned two!!

For those of you who don't know, I threw Mike a 30th birthday party on Saturday. He knew he was getting a party, but didn't know any of the details! The party had an England theme because his present from Benjamin and I is a trip to England in February. Everyone was asked to dress up as an England character or personality and our guests really met the challenge! We had Mary Poppins and Bert the chimney sweeper, Dr. Who, Ozzy Osbourne, Supernanny, Elton John, Bridget Jones, the Beatles, lots of soccer players and fans and many many more creative costumes. I was very impressed! I made Shepherd's Pie, which I am told was very tasty and served many other English-treats! The party was a big success, as you can see by the photos online at our Flickr page. Now we just have to figure out all of the details of our trip to London!!!!

Here is a video of Mike blowing out his many many many candles!