Medifast Status: Day 112, Down ~48.5lbs
I did pretty well getting up nice and early this morning and getting back to a normal schedule. Work was slow today, for the most part, which I appreciated. Today we started looking at what our options are going to be to leverage my upcoming furlough time – three weeks of it that we need to utilize. We really want to take the opportunity to go to Europe on a real vacation but have been unsure how to do it. We have two trips to New York to make next year spaced out that will make all travel pretty difficult.
It turns out that the weddings in New York are not happening when we had originally thought, next year, and are closer together than we were expecting. So it looks like we might be able to pull off a single drive to New York, wedding, fly to Europe, spend a month in Europe, return to New York, visit with family, wedding and then do the return drive to Texas. Quite a crazy trip but it will minimize our driving and allow us to holiday in Europe for an entire month! We are very excited about that possibility.
I came home at lunch so that Dominica and I could talk about the European possibilities. I am trying to eat as little as possible today as I feel like I have been getting too many calories the last several days and I need to make up for that a bit. So I skipped food all morning and just had a Medifast bar at lunch. We talked about potential plans and after an hour or two we think that we have the framework of a European vacation plan.
We will start by flying to Ireland and renting a cottage. We will stay there for at least a week and do what we can to see the country without actually having to drive anywhere. I’m not willing to drive on the left – too much risk for too short of a time period. If we were staying in Ireland and/or the UK for a season perhaps. But not for a week or two. While in Ireland I will spend a few days in Belfast working from the office there. I will actually be working the whole time that we are in Ireland.
Likely while still in Ireland I will leave the girls for two days and fly to Warsaw, Poland and work from the office there. We have a large team there and this is my chance to sit with them for a little bit. Then I will return to Ireland, get the girls and we will move on to Switzerland for our real holiday. We want to hit a lot of different areas of Switzerland like Zurich, Luzerne and Bern. We might do a day trip or something to Salzburg as well. I’m sure that we will spend more than a week in Switzerland.
From Switzerland we are thinking that we will travel south down to Genoa and the Italian Riviera. It will only give us a tiny taste of Italy but we will get to see two really major cities (Milan and Genoa) and a good cross section north to south of northern Italy. Then west through the French Riveria to Nice and then to Barcelona. From there up to the Alsace in France where we will stay until we return to Ireland for the flight back to New York.
Once back in New York we will have some time to visit with our families up there before going to my other cousin’s wedding and then we can drive back down to Dallas. It is a massive trip but we are unlikely to get a chance like this again for a really long time and I have not had a vacation on par with this ever. My longest time away from work was our honeymoon to Nova Scotia in 2004 and that was not nearly for as long. This trip as the incredible benefit of all of the travel, first to New York and then to Europe, happening before the actual vacation by as much as two weeks. So the vacation actually takes place once I am already there which is awesome. It should be, if all goes to plan, three actual weeks of vacation in Europe. That would be awesome.
We watched some of Rick Steve’s Europe tonight. All stuff that we had seen before but we are going back over the stuff in the areas where we are hoping to get to be.
I did well on my diet today. I had my lean and green and two Medifast meals and nothing else. No snacks or anything. Hopefully that will help to get me back on track. My calorie average has been too high.
I tracked my water today. I’m drinking almost exclusively from my 64oz (that is two quarts or a half gallon) Racetrac thermal mug which makes it really easy to track. I had five and a half of those plus a 20oz of coffee today. That turns out to be 2.9 gallons! That is a sign of ketosis, so not too surprising. I also appear to have developed urticaria, not unheard of as a side effect of prolonged ketosis as well (basically a skin rash – likely caused from the high level of acetone in my skin.) That is pretty crappy. I’m hoping that I can keep it under control. It can get pretty bad for people on ketosis diets in some rare cases.
We stayed up late looking at possible options for traveling around Europe. Liesl slept in her own bed tonight about which she was not happy at all. She really likes getting to sleep in our room. But even Luciana is very close to moving to her own room now. Only another month or so.
Normal day tomorrow. I will be rather tired as we stayed up until nearly one in the morning and I get up just after five. That is not a lot of sleep.