After a wonderful  three and a half week whirlwind tour of Europe, we’re grateful to back home again!  We spent time in England with my family, time in Greece with Nik’s family, and threw in a bonus stopover in Iceland on our way home.  Nik fulfilled a tennis coach’s dream and got to go to Wimbledon (even sat in Centre Court!).  We did lots of swimming in the wonderfully warm Mediterranean and ate lots of great food wherever we went.  Most of all, we loved seeing our families and especially watching the mutual love fest between Ellie and all her newly-met relatives.  All in all, it was a great trip!  I’m sure I’ll share some pictures sometime “soon” but I’m not making any promises as to when.  We have a lot of catching up to do around here.  You should see the weeds that grew in our absence!

P.S. For those of you who were wondering about the crazy storms in Maryland a couple weeks ago, thankfully our house was spared any damage.  Our neighbor across the street lost a gigantic tree that easily could have done major damage to either his house or ours.  We are so grateful that it fell the way it did (actually opposite of the way it naturally was leaning), although we’re sad for our neighbor who lost his truck, and also sad for the loss of that magnificent tree.  We have an exceedingly loyal friend who put ice in our freezers and rescued our food from certain thawing over our 3-day power outage.  Thank you Julie (and Ben too!)!!!!!!!!!  All in all, we came out just fine and are grateful to our friends and neighbors who kept us posted while we were worrying in Greece.  We figured it must be something major when we saw Governor O’Malley talking on the news with Greek subtitles!