Our Dance Card

Last year was realtively uneventful as far as visitors were concerned.To be sure, we loved having the people who came, but not that many of those we invited actually showed up. This year is shaping up to be different.

Our first guests are Walter and Luise from Schwabisch-Hall in Germany. Walter is one of Amy's second cousins. We met him briefly at a party in our honor in Gaildorf when we were visiting two summers ago. When we sent out the link to our blog and invited Amy's German relatives to come, he was inspired to have a "Big Italian Adventure" of his own, so here he is! They spent a few days in Rome and then we met them at the train station this morning. We are looking forward to showing them the area and I will certainly include our doings in later blog posts.

Next up will be Maggie and company, sometime in October. No firm date yet, as they fly standby using Greg's pilot benefits and status, but they will be coming.

Our friend Jonathan will be dropping in at the beginning of November on the trailing end of a business related trip to Spain. He will be staying through my birthday and perhaps giving a presentation on his graduate work on second language acquisition to our faculty and/or students.

My sister Emily and her man Max are planning to be with us over Christmas break. Our break here and her break there start on the same day. No tickets yet, but we are expecting them. We have room for more over that break and perhaps other members of my family will join them. My Mom went so far as to price out tickets, but we don't actually expect her to make the trip as she visited us last Christmas and her husband, Jim, will have serious trouble getting time off from work a second year in a row. Nate and Fran are at least mumbling, but their current situations are too vague to be able to commit.

Finally, we have Amy's BFF Becky and her daughter Sarah joining us in mid/late April. It will be Becky's second trip to Italy. The first time was as a co-chaperone for one of Amy's trips with her students at ELHS. Sarah has never been. They already have tickets and are working on a passport for Sarah. Amy is psyched, to say the least!

It may seem like there is still a lot of open space for visitors, but once you factor in almost 3 weeks of overnight school trips, another 2 weeks of school day expeditions sprinkled around, a couple of trips we have planned for ourselves, the rush of ending the school year and our summer plans then, in truth, our dance card is nearly full. Anyone else looking to come should contact us and stake a claim to what is left before everything fills up!