February 13, 2018: First Day in the Office in Norcross

Tuesday. We are in Norcross today, having arrived around midnight last night.  We got the kids up this morning and dragged them down to have breakfast in the hotel.

After breakfast I had to find the office, which was not far away and was not too hard to find.  It’s actually in a converted house, which threw me off a bit.

I’m working in the “basement”, or semi-basement.  Lots of space, though.  We had a very good day.  And I got sent home to hang out with the family during lunch, which will not be practical to do most days, but made sense to do today.  So I was home with the kids not long at all after I went in, maybe just three hours later, and got forty minutes or so to spend with them before returning.  The office is just a couple of blocks from the hotel.

The girls were very happy that I came home for lunch.  And then I was home around four thirty again, so not a long day and with them doing school we really aren’t missing time with each other at all.

This evening we did the manager’s social hour, which is really just a happy hour, down in the lobby.  We were surprised, there is a lot of food plus it is an “open bar” of wine and beer!  Very impressive.  We ate a full dinner down there, plus had our wine for the evening.  This works out great.  We never think about this social hour in the hotel as part of the value of the Hilton long stay properties, but boy does it make a difference both in giving you something to do, but also in making it affordable.  Really, with how good this and breakfast are, we can’t afford not to stay with Hilton!

We hooked up the Kindle Fire Sticks in the hotel.  That worked great.  We really need one additional one, there are so many televisions in so many places that we stay now that having an additional fire stick would go a long way.  In this hotel we have two bedrooms, and a living room, all with televisions.  The girls have the Steam laptop hooked to the television in their room, and the Fire Stick is on the television in the living room, but it would be nice to have something on the television in Dominica and my bedroom, too.

We went grocery shopping together as a family at Publix just around the corner from the hotel this evening.  We have a full fridge and pantry in the hotel, so are able to really grocery shop and make it make sense.  Dominica is able to feed the girls their lunches that way.  Very easy.

The girls are loving having their own room and have no interest in sleeping with us here.  They each have their own beds, which is a huge novelty, and their room is much farther away from us here than it is back home, so they like that, too.  Although it is nothing like the distance away from us like it was in Spain or Italy, or even Greece.  More like Panama.