Sretan Nova Godina (Happy New Year)

Fireworks over the canal

James's rogaine is working!

Always on the hunt for a great cinnamon roll!

Brendan and Cory and Jesse at Katwijk on the North Sea

Brendan, Cory and James at Katwijk

After 10 plane rides in 3 weeks, it's nice to be home. Being home for the holidays was worth all the flying...food, family, food, friends, food. It was great.

We spent the last week of our break in The Netherlands. We were delighted to find out that the Dutch love their fireworks! They don't have a state sponsored New Year fireworks display, but every Dutch man, woman, and child has a least one US-deemed illegal, personal explosive ordinance. These they light off around midnight all around the canals. They seem to wait for their turn, more or less, so maybe one or two large ones will go off in opposite directions, while many single blasts happen 360 degrees around you. What we would call a "grand finale" went uninterrupted for thirty minutes while church bells rang for twenty minutes. The sound of the bells was hardly audible, but it was fun to know that someone was enthusiastically pounding on them---at least we like to believe in human-powered bell ringers. A few torpedo-like fireworks exploded in front of the bridge we shared with a hand full of Lieden residents. If you haven't already, and you get a chance, it is well worth it to go to any medium sized town in Holland for a New Years celebration!

Of course, you can't leave Bosnia without a bit of hassle. The fog has set in again and we haven't seen the sun since arriving back into the "heart shaped country" last Sunday. People say the fog has been here for 4 solid weeks. Our plane circled the Sarajevo for about 40 minutes before deciding that visibility was too low and we turned around to land in Zagreb instead. So, we spent another 8 hours on another bus from Croatia to Sarajevo. I've flown in/out of Sarajevo a total of 5 times and on 3 of those trips, I have had to bus to Zagreb.