Exactly nine years ago, our family moved to the Netherlands. As you can see from the photographic collage here above, we've changed and grown a lot from year to year. What an adventure it's been!

Garrison Keillor once articulated the Midwestern attitude towards traveling in a pretty accurate and effective way. In speaking of his fictional home in Lake Wobegon, he said, "People take a dim view of extravagance in Lake Wobegon, and to travel someplace where you do not have relatives to stay over with is frowned on by most. You can travel off someplace for your niece's wedding or your aunt's funeral, but just to higgeldy-piggeldy go off to some foreign country just to see it, I mean, that's what you subsribe to the National Geographic for."

My Midwestern mindset has been modified through the years of living in Europe, still there's a part of me that somewhat struggles with the seeming extravagance of international travel. But fortunately our family was recently able to take a trip to England, while faithfully adhering to the old Midwestern values of visiting friends (and Midwestern friends, no less!) along the way. From our days at Bowling Green State University, Marci and I have been able to maintain contact with friends who now live in both London and in Sheffield. So when the kids' Fall Break came along this year, we rather spontaneously decided to travel to England... and it ended up being a great experience.

We saw some great historical sites (typical for England).

We enjoyed some great weather (unusual for England).

And we appreciated the opportunity to interact with some great people, who bridged the best that both England and Ohio have to offer.

Some of our family's favorite experiences were the ferry from Hoek van Holland to Harwich and an unexpected opportunity to go punting on the Cam in Cambridge...

But really, each of the experiences we had -- including disappointments, like missing the evening choral performance at King's College in Cambridge by just 30 seconds -- were memorable in their own way. The only thing that truly disappointed me was that I never really got to hear anyone say, "Tally-ho," or "Bally-hoo" or "Cherrio."

As much fun as we had on our trip, it was also the exciting, exhausting sort of vacation -- not so much the restful, refreshing sort. So it's also nice to be back in Amsterdam now. But we'll always have fond memories of England.

(In case you'd like to see more pictures from our time in England, there are more posted in the Family Pictures section of our website.)

It doesn't seem to be a junk-yard. It doesn't seem to be an art installation. It's just a mountain of bicycles in an area of the neighborhood that's otherwise full of new building projects. I don't know what it is... except that it's interesting.

The autumn seems determined to make a grand entrance, here in the Netherlands, particularly in the form of highly volatile weather patterns. A fifteen-minute bicycle ride starts out with blue skies, cycles through heavy winds and rainfall, and then back to blue skies again by the end of the ride. It can be crazy and unpredictable... But it can also be breathtakingly beautiful. I've probably seen five or six rainbows in the past few days. But the dramatically-illuminated clouds are probably my favorite.

Oh, that my photographic skills were sufficient to the task of capturing the glory of an Indian Summer morning in Amsterdam...

I love the color and direction of the morning light these days. Even if I can't quite capture the full glory of it with a camera, I still appreciate the moment more than my inadequacies in capturing it.