The Eagles Have Landed

After three exhausting but incredible weeks in Italy, we've made it back to St. Louis. We already miss our Dublin friends and hope everyone is doing well. And we've already had a great time catching up with our St. Louis crowd. It's surreal being back in the states during the springtime. Temperatures are already nearing 80, and I can feel my allergies springing back to life. We enjoyed a nice turbulent thunderstorm early this evening - the first time I can remember seeing lightning since we left in 2005.

As for our settling process, we're frantically searching for a house right now, and will be starting our car search soon. Nate starts work again tomorrow, so most of the searching will take place on evenings and weekends - talk about hitting the ground running! I have a job interview on Friday, so I'm prepping big time for that. At least we have mobiles though - on Saturday, not 24 hours after we landed, we went into the mall and left 2 hours later with mobile phones! It took us a month to get our mobiles in Ireland, and at least three or four trips to the Vodafone store on Grafton. It was a lovely and wonderful thing to get a mobile phone on our first try - my parents were wondering why it took as long as it did!

We'll be updating you on more stories of our reassimilation, and hopefully posting a few pictures just as soon as possible.

Stay Tuned - We're in Transition!!!

My apologies - I wasn't able to write any of the posts I said I would before we sold our computer! International moving is super busy!
We've now moved out of our Dublin place - that was a strange and ambivalent moment to say the least! We also had some great outings with our friends right before we left. I'll try to post on all of those things when I'm back in the US. Until then, we're currently on our last hurrah in Europe! So I won't be posting again until things are more settled, which will be after April 20.
We're taking a ton of pictures here, but have no way of loading them onto a computer, so you'll just have to wait! Just to give you a teaser: we spent two days in Barcelona, soaking up everything Gaudi. Unfortunately it poured the entire time, so our experience was much more limited than we would have liked. At least we had our previous trip! Sans rain, Barcelona is one of our favorite places that we've visited.
Italy has been amazing so far. We are in the Cinque Terre right now and have been doing plenty of hiking and lounging on the beach. Can't wait to see the pictures. We'll be headed off to Florence, Siena, Venice, Rome and Orvieto before we return. Lots to look forward to!
Well, that's the last update from me for a few weeks! Hope everyone is well - please check back in toward the end of April!!!