Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up this morning and set about trying to get at least one Kidding Around Europe Podcast completed before we had to get in the car to go to the airport.  We did so much work yesterday getting these podcasts recorded it would be a shame not to get at least one of them ready and edited so that people can hear it.  I am not giving myself any ability to edit them while I am on the road, I am going to be far too busy dealing with travel, living out of a hotel and starting a new job to even think about editing a podcast while I am out in California so if we miss this morning there will be at least two additional weeks until a new episode is released and that is just too ridiculously long.

So I worked like crazy this morning and managed to get the very long Luzern podcast completed and posted while getting everything packed and ready that needed to be before we had to leave at a quarter till eleven.  So that made for a busy morning but I am very glad that I did it.  I also took care of paying some bills and some other miscellaneous stuff that you never think of until you are sitting around getting ready to head out of the house for two whole weeks without any access to the stuff that you normally have access to every day.

We have two additional podcasts now that have been recorded but not edited.  Those I hope to get ready and posted promptly upon returning to New York in thirteen days.  I get back the Saturday after next, two weeks from yesterday at noon after flying the red eye back from California.  I am so thankful that my new job was so willing to fly my in last minute today and back so promptly in two weeks and to do so from our local White Plains airport.  Those flight details alone have made everything so much easier.

Things went pretty well this morning and we were all packed into the car on time.  Dominica and I were discussing on the drive to Westchester County Airport in White Plains just how amazingly blessed we have been with the weather and conditions from all of our traveling this year.  We have been driving and flying all over for months now and we have had just no weather concerns at all which is nearly impossible to believe considering when and where we have been going and just how much of it we have been doing.

It would turn out that tonight we would discover that a major blizzard, predicted to be possibly the worst on record and codenamed Juno, was expected to bury the Westchester area in as much as thirty inches of snow tomorrow!  I flew out just in time to miss it.  Even just hours later the clear day would have been a very snowy one and many flights were starting to be cancelled.  This could have been very bad.  Instead I had no weather concerns with my flight and Dominica had no issues driving.  She had a nice, clear, crisp day to drive to and from the airport.

We got to the airport right on time.  I gave hugs and kisses to my girls, Luciana did not like the cold and told me that I had to close the door.  Lies, however, held my arm and did not want to let me go.

Once in the airport I grabbed a quick sandwich at the Dunkin Donuts for breakfast and got through the security line with loads and loads of time to spare.  I found a place where I could plug in my iPhone and get it charged up to one hundred percent, just to be safe, and spent an hour playing Trivia Crack on the phone while it charged.

I am traveling today with my new hard shell luggage that Dominica bought for me as a surprise last night and my CPAP bag.  Very light for two weeks!

The flight was fine on this first leg.  A quick fifty nine minute hop to Philadelphia.  I shared a two seat row with a semi-retired teacher from California who grew up in Connecticut.  We talked the whole way and did not notice the trip at all.  Of course, being less than an hour, there was little to notice.

I had an hour and a half layover in Philadelphia so once I found my gate I found some substantial food to eat.  I found  place called Burrito Elito and they had a No Meato Burrito so I got that.  It was huge and tasty and insanely messy.  It just disintegrated as I ate it.  I had to practically hold half a burrito’s worth of burrito guts in my left hand as I attempted to scoop up the filling with the right hand.  Probably not the best choice of food for an airport but it tasted good and was a decently healthy choice, all things considered.

The flight from Philly to San Francisco was the long one.  It felt like forever.  The flight, on US Air (now a part of the new American) did only a single drink service and no food service, not even a cracker or cookie snack, for the entire flight which was about seven hours, I think.  We had really good winds, which also made for a lot of turbulence, but made great time.  We took off at five after four eastern and landed around seven thirty Pacific.  So seven hours but we got in half an hour early.  On this flight I sat in the middle of a full three person row and neither person beside me said one word the entire trip.  Thankfully it was a new Airbus A321 and not a Boeing 737 which it replaced as the seats were larger and I actually fit there.  It was not actually uncomfortable.

During the flight I listened to J. Maarten Troost’s “Headhunters on My Doorstep” and only had about twenty minutes left of the book when the plane landed in California to fifty five degree weather.  Quite a difference from the heavy snow starting to come down back in New York.

My flight had had the free T-Mobile texting, again, so I was able to talk to a number of people while I flew.

I grabbed a taxi and rushed off to my hotel, the Carriage Inn on Seventh Street right in San Francisco proper.  The taxi ride was about forty five dollars but did not take too long.  We were late enough and it was a Sunday so traffic wasn’t horrible.

My only goal for tonight is to get into the hotel, settle in and relax.  And that is exactly what I did.  I got checked in and got assigned the Hunter S. Thompson room, which was perfect as that was a writer that Troost was discussing in the book that I was reading on the way here! (Thompson is famous for inventing gonzo journalism and he wrote “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”.)  I have no computer tonight.  To save on space and weight we decided that bringing my laptop was going to be foolish and that it was smarter to just wait until I got my laptop from work tomorrow and just make do tonight.  Having two would be silly.  It is, in theory, just one night without a way to write anything.  So no updates from me tonight.  (I actually wrote the update on Monday night once I had a laptop.)

I found a burger joint called Custom Burger (actually a chain, Ryan says one is going in on Market Street near 1180 in Newark, New Jersey where we used to live) right across the street so I walked over and investigated.  The front desk at my hotel had informed me that they had veggie burger options there and I had been feeling like a veggie burger tonight so this was perfect.  Cheap, close and easy.

I got the burger (and some fries and onion rings) to go and brought them back to my hotel room.  It was a long day of traveling and I did not really feel like hanging out alone in a semi-fast food place.  I tried turning on the television but realized that I have no idea what is on or how to find something to watch on a traditional television so I turned that back off again.  I have actually lost the ability to use a television in any meaningful way!

I watched some short travel shows on YouTube while I ate.  The food was quite good.  I posted a little on Facebook although being online is a little frustrating as I do not have a computer which which to do my posting so I am working just from my iPhone.  I caught up on Trivia Crack and climbed into bed.  It was probably no later than nine thirty when I got to bed.  Very early indeed but my internal clock is still on eastern time.  I will be awake far too early tomorrow.

I got up this morning, around eight thirty, and discovered that we had gotten a pretty serious snow fall during the night. Maybe as much as six inches had come down.  This is one of the few actual snow falls that we have had all winter.  It was quite unexpected.  Beautiful, though.  Not often that we get to enjoy this view from our Peekskill house.

Today we decided to do some work on our podcast which is very far behind.  That has been a struggle between everything that we have had going on and the kids just never giving us a time where they are quiet enough for us to actually work on it.  It is practically impossible to get the recordings done.  Dominica cannot do them late at night either because she gets tired and that is the primary time when the house is quiet making it extra hard.

We did manage to record three podcasts today, though, which was awesome.  Then this afternoon Dominica really wanted to go to Applebee’s so we did that around five.  She had a very old $25 gift card to use there and since there really is not an Applebee’s in Texas that we can use we needed to use it now or never really have a chance to do so.  So we did.  It was a nice change of pace and Applebee’s appears to have put in a bit of effort in fixing their menu because for the past few years it has been pretty awful.  There were a few options for us now and both Dominica and I decided that we wanted to get the cedar salmon which ended up being excellent.  We both really liked it.  The girls both picked out real food to get too, mac and cheese for Luciana and a French bread pizza for Liesl.

After dinner we stopped at Walmart in Peekskill to pick up some necessary supplies.  Dominica is really hoping that she will not need to go out and do any shopping during the time that I am in San Francisco.  I stayed in the car with the girls.

Sadly, Walmart was completely out of the chocolate milk meal substitutes that the girls use so Dominica was unable to get any.  That will be a problem as they already do not have enough for their morning meals.  Of course, in several weeks we will be facing this problem in Europe where there is absolutely not availability of these supplements so we have no idea what we are going to do then.  We will figure it out when we get there.

Once we got back to the house we talked for a bit and decided that it was necessary for me to run out and see what I could do to find the chocolate milk.  So I took a drive up to Fishkill to the Super Walmart up there and thankfully they had ten units of the chocolate milk in stock so I bought them out.  Dominica is very relived.  This is enough to hold her until several days after I return from San Francisco.  The girls will be very happy too.

Pretty soon after my return we got the girls off to bed.  I did a lot of work editing the podcasts that we made today.  I really want to get at least one posted before I leave for my flight tomorrow and would love it if I could get the others scheduled to post during the time that I am gone so that the site is not idle.  There are more eyes on it than normal, now, as we prepare for our next adventure in Europe.

While I was working tonight my office chair which I have had for maybe as much as ten years, although probably more like eight, finally gave out on me.  The metal plate on the bottom of it actually sheared and the chair is now scrap.  I thought that the timing was especially poignant given that I was wrapping up the final posts on my last night here in Peekskill and the last night before I go to San Francisco to begin the next major chapter in my adventures.  Dominica is hopeful that the house will be packed and that we will be moving out of it immediately upon my return from California, which would be very nice indeed.  So it is possible that tonight was actually the final night that I will actually have use of the chair so that it completely fell apart tonight is perfect.  Now, instead of being moved in the truck and possibly stored indefinitely it will simply be scraped and we do not have to worry about it at all.

My flight tomorrow is just before two o’clock out of White Plains, for the third time in two months, making things very easy for Dominica and the girls.  An easy drive and an easy time for the flight.  I am connecting through Philadelphia which is on the way rather than way off in some odd direction and my layover is short so that should be very nice.

Dominica bought be a new suitcase for this trip while she was at Walmart and she got me almost completely packed tonight and for what is not packed she got the laundry running so that we can pack everything up in the morning.  I am not traveling with my laptop, this time, which is a scary thing for me.  I am counting on having my new laptop to work from on Monday evening.  I do not have room in my luggage to take my current laptop with me.

Before calling it a night I managed to complete the first podcast that we did today.  It was the long forty minute one on Luzern.  I also managed to finish up the SGL post for today (that you are reading now) so that I would not have to worry about that tomorrow morning.  I am doing my writing from a step stool which is the closest thing to a chair that we have left in this house now that my old office chair is dead.

Between last night and this morning Dominica has done a tremendous amount of work looking into flights, apartments, rental cars and everything.  At this point, are basic travel plans are pretty much arranged.  There have been a lot of changes made but mostly at a pretty small level.  We have a really good idea of what our trip is going to be like now.  There were some changes in the planning around the Tocco / Grice / Miller Disney Vacation as well which allows me to fly in early, on Friday evening, and see my family in Walt Disney World.

The original Disney plan was that I was going to stay in Houston and Dominica and everyone was going to return to Houston after their trip to Disney and then, after several days and probably a full week for Dominica and the girls to recover from driving from Orlando to Houston we would fly out of Houston to get to Europe.  But enough changed that instead I am flying to Orlando on Friday evening, spending all day Saturday in EPCOT with the girls and then we are flying out of Orlando to go to Dublin that night!  We get to go to Europe a full week earlier this way and Dominica and the girls have to do tons less traveling in total.  This is a huge win.  Plus, for “free” I get a whole day in Disney with the girls and do not have to completely miss out on this trip.  I already missed out on their one day stop in Disney over the summer in 2014.  I have not made it to WDW since our long trip in 2013.  What is funny here, of course, is that our last relocation, from Texas to NY, involved going to WDW en route between the two.  Now, when we are moving from the US to Spain we are doing the exact same thing.  The girls will spend a week in WDW while already in motion towards Europe.  They are going to start to associate moving with getting a week in Disney World while doing the transition.

From Orlando we are heading to Dublin, Ireland.  This is a big change from our original plans.  This is happening because we are flying on Aer Lingus and getting a full day layover there in Dublin.  Somehow this magically makes the flight really cheap.  So we are going to leave the airport, get a hotel in town and see Dublin for a day.  A mini Irish trip to kick off our time in Europe.  We won’t get a lot of time in the city but it will give us a chance to begin adjusting to the time difference and will help a lot with keeping us from succumbing to overwhelming exhaustion.  I will be doing three consecutive days of long flights with busy days in between them and I do not sleep on airplanes so having proper time to rest along the way will be very important.

We leave Dublin the next morning and fly to Madrid.  From there we will take the train to Malaga on the southern coast where we will rent a car and drive to a little hill top village with just over four hundred residents where we will be living for a while.  Our trips to London and Scotland are not happening during the late spring as we had thought that they might so we have extended our time in Spain to include all of that time.  Dominica managed to get the apartment all lined up and secured today.  It is a three bedroom, two bath village house right on the plaza mayor with a roof top terrace that can see the village, the surrounding mountains and when the weather is really clear you can even see the Atlas Mountains in Morocco over the straights in Africa!  How much more awesome can it get?  And to top it all off, Dominica managed to get the landlords to knock a full grand off of the price of the apartment making it dramatically cheaper than the rent that we will get for our Peekskill house so we will actually be saving some money while we are there.  That is huge.  And she figured out how to get us a rental car for the entire time that we are there so we are going to have a lot of flexibility.  A Renault Clio stick shift will be our silly little European transportation while we are there.

We will be in Spain for a long time and are very excited to have a lot of time to settle in and get to know the people and the area.  Lots of time to use the car to explore Andalusia.  We plan to visit Morocco at some point as well and Gibraltar, too.

Once our time in Spain, for this cycle, is over in early June we will make a transfer up to Oslo where we will be “vacationing” for a week in Norway during the lower cost shoulder season before we fly on to New York to spend the summer with family there.

The drama going on today is that we found out that the trip to Walt Disney World is not going to be the trip that it was supposed to be.  Originally the whole trip was scheduled around the fact that my niece was marching in an actual Disney parade through the Magic Kingdom!  It was going to be a huge deal.  But it turns out that the school decided to cancel this after everyone had paid and committed to doing it and instead are just sending the kids to do a private workshop in WDW which is nothing at all like doing a real performance and it is just a band thing rather than a major marching event – and they are famous as a marching band.  It’s a huge deal.  Families were not told until it was way, way too late to back out and the kids were not informed at all.  All of those kids that voluntarily gave up their spring breaks to stay with their classmates and do a major marching performance have had that stolen from them and now they get to do no performance, have to spend their time sitting in a class and do not get their spring break nor their money back.  Completely unprofessional and unethical on the part of the school.  The whole thing is ridiculous.  This really reinforces why we don’t want our kids in public schools.   Not one thing in this entire event was handled with a minimum of professional or even human courtesy.  And, of course, zero consequences for the school or the people at fault.  Not only is it just an awful situation, but the lesson to the students is that teachers aren’t accountable and don’t have to behave with even a modicum to the same level that even high school freshmen are held to in the same program.  As is often the case, there is no way that the teacher in this case could make it in the program that he runs – it is too demanding for his level of commitment and competence.    Infuriating and shameful.

We did some more packing today.  Not a ton, but a good chunk.  The basement is really coming along well.  The portable shelving units have been all broken down and compacted, a huge garbage bag of stuff to throw out has been filled and a few boxes have been filled.  The back portion of the basement is almost done.  We really are actually within site of completion.  It seems like there is just tons and tons to do but really it is almost all just the stuff that we need in order to operate day to day that cannot be done until the very last second that is left.

We ordered in Chinese for dinner and we finished watching the third installment in the Aerial Spain series that we can watch on Hulu+.  Then we watched a few episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

Tomorrow is my last day before flying off to San Francisco.  Lots to be done including getting me all packed up and ready to go.

We did far better this morning.  I was up at seven thirty, showered and got ready to leave.  This time Dominica and the girls were already up and pretty much ready to go.  We got everyone loaded up into the Acadia and managed to get down to the Peekskill train station with plenty of time before the train arrived.  I even had a few minutes to sit in the warm car before heading out.

Today I remembered my headphones and my iPod and I managed to listed to about an hour of J. Maarten Troost’s “Headhunters at My Doorstep“.  Troost is one of my favourite non-fiction writers and I have read all three of his previous books.  This one is pretty new.  I was unaware that this book was heavily focused on his struggles with alcoholism after his Pacific island travels and lifestyle had come to an end after his first books had been written.

I got down to Manhattan at the same time as yesterday.  Had a fun and productive day.  Rob and I went and found a bar around five thirty and had a few beers before we went to Grand Central Terminal to catch our trains.  His going uptown and my off-peak Hudson Line back to Peekskill.  This is it, the last scheduled Metro North connection for the planned future.  The New York City portion of our lives is now over.  I got onto the train and whisked away up the Hudson to Peekskill where Dominica and the girls were waiting for me.  New York City is now behind me both literally and figuratively.

Luciana had requested that we go back to the Westchester Diner again.  She is so funny.  Out of nowhere she decides that she really wants pancakes from the diner the same that she had last night and she gets all excited about it.  So we had to go, obviously.  So we did the same thing as last night.  We only have a couple of chances to be at a NY diner while here in Peekskill left so there is no reason to skip the chance now.

After dinner we got back to the house and we were all straight off to bed.

Today and tomorrow I am in Manhattan.  This is a little weird, after so many years of working in and around the city these last two days are the last times that I will likely be in New York City for a very long time.  It has never been that I actually go into the city much at all but it has always been right there and a major pivotal component of our lives.  That geographic chapter of our lives is ending now and it seems strange to really be leaving New York City behind. It seems stranger now than it did when we did the same thing in 2009.  Back then we had not been tied to the city for as long and there always seemed to be this feeling that we would return not just to the city but to the house where Liesl was born.  And we were right, we did return and this run here in Peekskill has been almost exactly as long as we were here the last time, back in 2008 and 2009.  But there is a different feeling this time.  This time we are leaving for good.  New York City is not destined to be a pivot point for us any longer.  And now I take my last train rides into Manhattan as a New Yorker of a sort.  As of Sunday morning our association to San Francisco will be stronger than our association with New York City.  Time to start our new lives.

It is a strange thing that San Francisco, of all places, is where I ended up finding that next chapter.  As a child I used to always say that I wanted to grow up and live in San Francisco.  I really don’t know why.  Maybe it was the draw of the Pacific, the cool weather, the interesting culture although I wonder how much of that I was aware of when I was young.  How do you decide where you want to live when you have no exposure to places?  My parents used to tell me that I wouldn’t like San Francisco and that I would be happier on the east coast.  I am not really moving to California now.  But San Francisco has been playing a slowly increasing role in our lives over the last three years and now it is a really major component.  Who would have guessed.

We were racing this morning to get to the train station.  I was up at seven thirty but Dominica and the girls were still asleep ten minutes before we needed to be out of the door.  We rushed to get moving and almost made it but the 9:13 train was bringing down the crossing bars as we were coming down the hill and at that point there is no way over to the other side to get onto the train.  Luckily we knew what to do and immediately got onto route 9 south before the train had even pulled into the station.  We drove right on to Croton-Harmon station to beat the southbound train there.  We made it just in time for me to run up, buy my ticket and get down to the platform with about three minutes to spare.  A handy trick.

In the rush this morning I forgot to bring my headphones with me and so could not listen to any of the Audible book titles that I had loaded up on my iPod to listen to on this ride.  So instead I did some reading on my iPad.

It was ten twenty when I got to Grand Central Terminal.  I walked down to fifth and spent the day hanging out with Rob and everyone.  It was a fun day.  Rob was feeling pretty sick, though, before the day was through and he had to take off early as he was really rough.

I made the seven fifty train back up to Peekskill.  Dominica and the girls picked me up before nine and we want to the Westchester Diner for dinner.  The girls got pancakes, of course, and Dominica and I both did fish and chips.

Once we were back home it was pretty much straight off to bed for everyone.  We are going to the train station at the same time tomorrow morning or, if possible, a few minutes earlier so that we can actually go to Peekskill rather than running to Croton-Harmon.  Tomorrow will be my last time in Manhattan for a very long time.  We have no plans to return to the New York City area in our future.  It could happen quite easily, of course, but it will be as a tourist, not as a local after that.