Home From Vacation

I am home from a lovely three week vacation in Europe.  I spent most of the time at my daughter's new home in Leiden which is in The Netherlands.  She has taken a teaching position at the American School of The Hague.  We biked to her work some mornings, her dad and I and Serene--sometimes in the company of other newly hired American teachers.  We helped her put up bulletin boards in her classroom the week before school started, hung pictures in her apartment, unpacked her dishes when her household shipment came from her last international teaching position in Serbia, and made dinner for her at night when she was not taking us out to eat at amazing restaurants.  We have not been so involved in her daily life for well over a decade and it was fun.  She worked long and hard getting acquainted with a new school system and her dad and I played all day.  We took the amazingly convenient train to other cities like The Hague and Amsterdam. (Why don't we have a good train system in the US?)  We biked in the Centrum of Leiden, getting lost dozens of times but having fun wherever we were.  We saw windmills and canals and magificent buildings that for Americans are jaw droppingly old.  In every way it was a great vacation.  Now I am back and already percolating new ideas for games, based in part on my European Adventure.