This is the first of the USA vacation blog posts. I’m going to make them using my own photographs (those from our cameras and my iPhone), and then after I’ve blogged everything I’ll add a final addendum post in which I include the best of the pics from everyone else’s cameras.
We set out on the morning of July 2 with a fair amount of luggage:
Take note! Two of those big suitcases contain only additional empty luggage! We’re learning!
The girls flew very well and without much complaint. It helped that we had row 20 of the Airbus 330, meaning we were the first row of Economy with miles of legroom before us at the beginning of Economy Plus. (I mention those details as a reminder to always try to book row 20 on Airbus 330s: we later learned you do this by arriving very early at the airport for check-in, though, so maybe it’s not worth it.)
This is the first photograph ever taken of Maddie in America:
And the following isn’t quite the second, but it’s the first good one.
It was hot and muggy from the start, but the very garden itself seemed to smile in welcome.
We fought through our jetlag the first day, staying awake as late as we could, and when we woke up it was July 3 — Molli Malou’s seventh birthday!
Maddie spoke exactly no English for the first two days. This was of deep concern to everyone, because we all knew she’d be with only English speakers from the 6th through most of the 8th. Her grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins were constantly having to prod her with, “What does daddy say?” — which seldom yielded results. (Partly because they would often try variants she didn’t know, like “what would your father say?” or “how would Daddy say that?”, that meant nothing to her, but mostly because she just refused to speak English.)
We spent a lot of every mealtime those first few days watching the nesting birds outside the dining room window. (More on those birds in the videos to come.)
Molli Malou could stand at the window and watch them for long stretches, narrating the goings on to anyone interested.
Winnie was still herself at this point, playful and happy and lovely with girls.
That afternoon we were joined by the Lees.
And suddenly it was time for the big birthday dinner!
This picture from my iPhone, pasted on Facebook, is my favorite shot of Molli Malou at seven. There she is, Miss America…!
Here’s a similar shot from the camera instead of the phone:
Matching M&M tees from the cousins! But you know what? Out of the literally thousands of pictures I took, I have not one in which both girls are in the M&M shirt at the same time. And yet I know they had them on simultaneously on several occassions.
Molli Malou was so excited for Mario Krash Kart — as we all knew we should be, which is why she got it from the Lees and her parents! (The Lees were kind enough to withdraw their gift so that Mor & Daddy could get some props.)
And a big hug to Pop-Pop, for giving her a construction manual and a promise to help her build a house during her visit!
(Lest posterity forget, in the following photograph I am wearing a Perry the Platypus tee-shirt given to me as a gift from my nieces, who know my fondness for Phineas & Ferb. They also got me a Dr. Doofenschmertz action figure that will be placed with pride on my desk at work on my first day back. Tomorrow. Ugh.)
At the end of the day, the cousins bedded down together for the first time in almost a year.
Calendar aficiandos have probably already deduced that when we awoke on Monday it was the Fourth of July, that quintessentially American holiday that always seems to fall on the first day of July after the third but before the fifth!
Balloon be damned, I love this picture of Hannah.
We hustled out to Ivoryton for the big parade.
On the way home we swung by the grocery store to pick up some fixin’s for dinner. Trine and I were once again astonished by the variety of even the most basic America grocery store. Only in America do stores have a barbecue sauce aisle!
I have pictures of the fireworks we set off that night, but the lighting isn’t very good so we’ll have to content ourselves with the videos of them (which will follow probably within a few weeks).
Pop-Pop took Molli Malou and me along for Winnie’s exercise the next morning.
Trine and I then spent most of the rest of the day getting ready for the ensuing ten days of travel: we would be leaving the girls in Deep River with Nana & Pop-Pop and Hannah & Sophie until Friday, when Pop-Pop would be driving them up to Chelmsford — whither Trine and I would also be returning from Thunder Bay. Then we would spend the weekend in Chelmsford and drive up to Lincoln, New Hampshire, for the rest of the week before driving back down to Deep River the following Friday. So we had to pack a bag for our trip to Canada, lay out things for the girls in Connecticut, and pack a bag for them to bring up to Chelmsford, along with a bag of the stuff Trine and I would need in Chelmsford and New Hampshire. It doesn’t sound that complicated, but it took most of an afternoon and evening to get it done.
And on Wednesday afternoon we took off from Logan on Porter Airlines for a prop flight to Toronto, where we changed to another prop plane for our trip to Thunder Bay.
This was our plane:
This was Toronto:
This was the approach to Thunder Bay:
And Thursday morning we had a full tour of the new Global Sticks factory, escorted by Morfar.
I was very fasdtidious about my camera work on that tour. I took one photograph and one video segment of every aspect of the production process, from the lumber piles out back to the packaged sticks being stacked for shipment, and was looking forward to putting together a kind of documentary on how Morfar’s factory turns trees into popsicle sticks. I also had a lot of nice pictures of Trine and me with Morfar, including some of the lovely dinner we ate that night at a fantastic steakhouse. Unfortunately, when we got back to our hotel room I discovered I no longer had the camera with me. We searched everywhere that night and the next morning, but never found it.
(Crazy Aunt Lisa, I apologize: I did a bad job of holding onto the camera you loaned us. But now you have more incentive to fly out to Copenhagen: instead of coming to reclaim your camera, come out to kick my butt!)
In any case, I tried to compensate by taking lots of pictures on my phone the next morning.
These lovely shots of Trine and me were actually taken in some kind of marketing stall within the airport itself, but no one has to know that. We can say they were the front porch of some lovely spot we visited…
The flight back to Toronto was rapid and uneventful. But we ended up spending about four hours in Toronto as a thunderstorm roared up the eastern seaboard delaying all incoming flights.
We got in late and by the time we got back to the Lee house, the girls had formed a quartet! (Another Facebook-posted iPhone shot that’s one of my favorites from the whole trip.)
First order of business that Saturday: shopping trip over the border to (tax-free) New Hampshire for a number of planned purchases, and the unplanned but now extremely important purchase of a brand new camera!
Returning from our spree, I unpack the camera and order Hannah to pose for shot number one. Bingo!
(Meanwhile, Maddie entertains herself ringing the doorbell for half an hour.)
Someone else let Maddie play with their camera: no way she was getting her hands on our brand new Panasonic Lumix!
See that expression? It’s wry. It’s like she’s saying, “Daddy, why do you worry about me touching the camera? In the whole history of our family, there’s only one person who’s ever lost one, and he’s lost two! And he’s you!“
Note that hillbilly hair, by the way: its days are already numbered!
By now, incidentally, Maddie’s English had come back to her, and was already showing signs of rapid development. By the time we got back to Denmark she would astonish everyone by speaking better English than Danish — using complete sentences and demonstrating deep understanding of some tricky idiosyncracies of the English language — and refusing to speak Danish to Mormor and Jørgen when they met us at the airport!
That night Gene made a bonfire out back and we roasted up some marshmallows.
Oh… and back in the house, Drs. Molli Malou and Sophie address the healthcare needs of some stuffed animals.
Patient bear had broken both arms, both legs, and his neck!
(It looks innocent enough, but to ensure the animals would be woudned enough to require care they gave them to Maddie and had her push them down the stairs. Honestly.)
Aunt Deb reveals the old “Book About Me” of mine that she had, as a vindictive little girl, seized and made her own, using it alternately to exalt herself and mock me. I took photos of every single page of the book to keep as an archive, but this one sort of says it all: “When I grow up, I want to be…” says the book. Little Greg wrote “Artist.” Little Deb gleefully added the mischievous F:
On Sunday we went to Sophie’s swim meet in Wayland. No good photos of Sophie swimming (plenty of videos, though, so just be patient), but I did get one cute shot of Hannah saving Maddie from what appears in the photo to be heat stroke but was in fact a mere fit of impatience.
Anyway, Monday morning Nana and Pop-Pop drive up with Winnie and by late morning we’re all en route to Lincoln New Hampshire. By early afternoon we were there.
And almost immediately we all went tramping off into the woods behind the condo to find the source of that whispering, whooshing sound like static.
We all loved splashing around in the cool mountain waters — well, almost all of us loved it…
We’re getting closer to the hour of Maddie’s haircut: here’s a good reminder of why it was so desperately needed.
There was a little playground on the walk between the condo and the pools.
Many an hour was spent at the condo with the ten of us sitting around in the living room, each and every one of us on a separate electronic device, often commenting on one another’s Facebook posts from all of five feet away.
At last it’s Waterloo for Maddie’s hillbilly hair! (Molli Malou also had her hair cut and braided, but she wasn’t a hillbilly to begin with so it’s less dramatic visually.)
Before:
Midway:
After!
I had known during the haircuts that I would want some lovely pictures of the girls together afterwards — in the tiny window of time between their being coiffed and dolled up like little princesses and their being all mussed and dirty from being themselves — so I had scouted out this location at the foot of Loon Mountain on our way to the barber and then after the haircuts we took the girls to a candy store in Lincoln and let them gather up big bags of candy that they were then told could only be opened after Daddy had taken a few hundred pictures of them being all adorable. So if you want to get a feel for the photo shoot, if you want that “in the moment” experience, just imagine Molli Malou saying, “Now can I have some candy?” and Maddie whining, “Want candy!” at about two-second intervals.
That’s the end of Part 1. You may now advance to…. Part 2!
Thanks for part 1