27 Jan-1 Feb: New York, New Haven, Boston

27 Jan: Charles de Gaulle airport submits us to the first security screening we both believe was actually worthwhile. Quick and efficient, the security procedure leaves us both confident. We are on board an Air France (aptly known as Air Chance for their superior tendency to misplace luggage) flight to JFK. We are running late. At JFK we are offered the upgraded, much larger version of the short-wheel base mini van we reserved to move all of our stuff at the low-low price of $150. We decline. They are out of the short base, we get the upgrade for free.


[Our first forum at FPC New Haven, the next four weeks will prove to be somewhat like a "book tour" as we take our "Chris & Susan does Baghdad" story on the road]

28-1 Jan: New Haven is pleasant, fortunate for us we did not come a week earlier when temperatures hovered around 1 degree Farenheit. We visit with friends from Yale, the rugby team, and do our first forum at the First Presbyterian church the morning after our arrival. We try to extract ourselves from the basement of our good friends Ken and Judy, and consolidate our belongings in our heavily overburdened storage in Boston. The minivan turns out to be a blessing as we pile our earthlies in the back and shuttle then up to Boston for the big prioritization operation. Salvation Army makes out like a bandit. We are horrified at the consumerism we had forgotten about for a year as we pass box after box after box of oversized collection of useless stuff that someone somewhere somehow convinced the public that they must have.

[Consolidating]