Wednesday. GT2 Day Thirty Two. New York, New York, USA.
This morning we started in Barcelona, Spain. Our time in Europe is over. I got up at seven thirty, showered and got ready for the day. Then sat at the kitchen table, my “desk”, and worked for several hours. One upside to the teens not having much energy is that I’ve gotten in a few long walks and a lot of time to work without them missing out on anything. I had a lot more time to get to things than I had expected to get, not having realized how much more energy I would have.
Dominica got up closer to nine. She showered and then go busy packing. We had to pack up the camera and the external hard drive by a quarter after ten. So that is that, no more filming of our trip except for the snippets that I grab with the phone. I had been warning the girls that we needed to do the final travel interviews by yesterday, but like going out, it kept getting pushed off and now the time is up. We are all packed to go and they were never done. We can’t do them later, unless we pull it off at the airport, because we go right from the apartment, to lunch, to the bus, to the airport, to the flight, to renting a truck (it was all that we could get), to Utica where they are getting straight into a car and driving to Texas the moment that we arrive. So there isn’t even a moment in the US to do it before they are gone. And they are going to Texas while we are staying in New York. And by the time that we are in Texas again, it is nearly time for them to start college. So the amount of time that will pass before we see them again is really huge, and seeing them both together will be super hard. I had told them that I really wanted to get them done by yesterday early on so that we could get them uploaded for everyone back home.
The girls were awake pretty early. Maybe from all of the noise of us moving around. Emily was probably up at nine. But neither got out of bed for a long time. They did nearly all of their packing yesterday, so are ready to go in that regard, I believe. Dominica and my packing was almost all done by ten thirty. My phone is charged up to one hundred percent. My watch is running low, nothing to be done about that. It will likely die on the plane. But not a big deal, it has done its job for this trip and will definitely be still working when we get onto the flight. I don’t really need to know the time after that. I have “Mansfield Park” downloaded to my phone to listen to on the flight.
Emily got out of bed at ten fifteen. Madeline at ten thirty.
Our checkout time is eleven. So we have seven hours between our apartment check out and our flight time. That is a lot of time to kill. It is an international flight in Europe, so we absolutely need to be at the airport three hours before our flight, which is at six twenty five. So that reduces our time to kill down to four hours. We have to get to the airport, which requires a metro trip to Placa de Catalunya, and then a bus ride on the Aerobus to the airport of at least twenty minutes. So that is at least forty five minutes of total travel, reducing our time to kill pre-airport down to just over three hours.
So the plan is to leave the apartment loaded down with all of our luggage on our backs, this time I am carrying a double weight load as I am getting the overloaded pack that is going into the checked luggage, and go back to Brunch & Cake by the Sea to eat, and then somehow kill a bit more time than you normally do at breakfast, and head to the airport. That’s it. Trip is over. It’s all logistics from here on in.