Journey Begun...er, Journey on Hold

Hello Family and Friends!




Welcome to Stam and Ceph's travel blog. It's hard to tell where a journey like the one we are on ends and where it begins...but I'm thinking we'll start with our 18 hour car ride through the states of CO, WY, NE, IA and IL with our 2 jungle kitties.







Thanks to modern pharmaceuticals we were able to sedate the cats for the entire trip...it only took 3 doses of sedatives each! Don't worry, that's OK to do...we checked before hand. Effectively, the cats did pretty well on the trip, though we didn't really give them a chance to be bad. It was easy to tell when they were waking up, the meowing would start, their eyes would widen, and the marathon running laps through out the car would begin (somehow the cats always manage to land directly on Cam's nuts every loop they made). Unfortunately, our cats just don't dig traveling. But as many of you know, I have a theory about dealing with things you don't really like...keep trying them until you do like them! It worked for me and tomato soup, so I'm thinking the cats just need more exposure. (That's my theory and I'm sticking to it as long as we have no other choice). :)

Currently we are hanging at my folks house in Naperville, IL. The cats have been getting acquainted with my parents's animals. Che has decided to make sure they all know he's the big cat on campus, while Lion has decided to be Mr. Salty Pants and hiss at everything that walks by. But I think it's just going to take some TIME (key word) for them to get used to a new place and new company surrounding them.

And TIME (key word is key now) is something we will have quite a bit of right now. We just had Cam's visa appt. with the French consulate today, and we didn't even consider the fact that when you apply for a visa you physically give them your passport because the consulate needs to stick the visa to the actual passport. So now the French consulate has Cam's passport and we aren't going anywhere for the moment. They say it will take no less than 2 weeks to process the visa, but they are still searching for the registration-of-our-marriage paperwork that I handed in back in September. Bureaucracy can really be the pits sometimes! So looks like we'll be camping out at my folks for at least another 2 weeks (if not more) before we actually go to France. But it is really nice to hang with my folks, they are so awesome about this whole thing...we couldn't do it without their support.

So the next couple weeks of our journey will entail getting better acquainted with Chicago and Naperville, and catching up on writing, reading, job searches, and each other. And Skyping the hell out of all of you! So get Skype now if you don't have it and look us up...sdwhall@hotmail.com.