Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I did a ton more research for our family tree today.  We are really getting a lot of branches tracked down and going really far back on my dad’s dad’s family.  It is amazing just how incredibly Swiss that part of the family is.  One remote branch is Norwegian (a surprise to everyone) and there is one person from the Czech Republic, long ago, and a few from the Alsace and one or two from German on the Rhine but by and large everyone is Swiss.  I knew that we were Swiss but the purity of the Swiss heritage is really surprising.  And we are not from a wide geographic sprawl within Switzerland either but from a rather tiny zone around Bern with a few people from the shores of Lake Constance.

We ordered in Domino’s to make things easy for lunch and we watched two episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

I got my travel plans for the next two weeks ironed out today.  I will be flying out of White Plains on Sunday (that’s just five days away!) and will be gone for two weeks.  On the evening of February 6th I will catch the red eye out of San Francisco and will be home by lunch time on Saturday.  It will suck losing the night of sleep but it makes it really easy for Dominica and the girls to deal with getting me to and from the airport.  So we are happy with how well that schedule turned out to be and that we have the details solidified now.  I don’t know where I will be staying in San Francisco yet but that is easy to deal with closer to when it is time to go.  As long as I know where I am going when I head to the airport on Sunday.

Tonight the girls and I played the last hour of Space Quest V.  I am glad to have that one over and done with.  We looked at the first five minutes of Space Quest VI, the last existing entry in the series, just to see what it looks like.  It appears to be a large leap in modernity over the former entries.  And it goes back to the audio narration of Space Quest IV which I much prefer.  I am hopeful that it will be better than the last ones.  The girls love them but these are not my favourite games by any stretch.

We put out a huge amount of stuff for pickup in the morning for donation.  We have about nine huge garbage bags full of stuff being donated, mostly toys, that are scheduled for an early morning pick up.  That cleared out a lot of the house.  You can feel that the house has been opened up with all of that stuff hauled out already.

Speaking of the morning, I am heading into Manhattan for the day so we have to be up rather early and I will be catching a morning train down to the city.  I will be in Midtown all day.  I’m only scheduled to get there at 10:30 so not a hectic morning.  I am hoping to be on the 9:13 train out of Peekskill which is off peak making things very easy.  I already have my iPod charged up and loaded with new Audible books so that I will have plenty of listening choices for the ride.  I am looking forward to a little quiet book time to myself.  I have not had any of that recently.

It was after midnight when I finally managed to get Liesl and Luciana into bed!  Boy they are good at managing to stay up late.

I did not get a lot of sleep last night despite having gone to bed exceptionally early.  Liesl and Luciana are little furnaces and they press right up against you when they sleep in your bed.  I had Liesl on one side and Luciana on the other and I was caught in the middle unable to move, which always makes it hard for me to sleep, and unable to stay cool enough to sleep.  So I woke up at three thirty sweating rather a bit.  I tried to go back to sleep but gave up by four and put in about four hours tracking down family histories online.  I managed to find hundreds of new family members that we previously knew nothing about.

I went back to bed to rest for about another hour but did not go back to sleep.

Dominica slept in the girls’ room last night as there was no room in our bed.  She got up shortly after I went back to bed because Luciana decided to get up, go into her own room and slapped Dominica in the face to wake her up and to ask for her morning chocolate milk.  Quite a way to be awoken.

This morning Dominica and I watched The Brian Boitano Project, which follows the Olympic skater as he “inherits” a home in the Lingurian region of Italy and renovates it to use as his second home.  It was interesting.

Then we finished watching Johnny English: Reborn on Netflix.  The girls enjoyed it.  They enjoyed it enough that Luciana asked us to watch the first Johnny English again.  She called it “the one like this one with the grown and staff, but not this one.”  Took Liesl to interpret that one for us.

Luciana watched Johnny English again. It is pretty funny that she has decided that she loves those movies.  She really likes National Treasure too and wanted to watch that again today, although we talked her into a family viewing of the Christmas Special of Doctor Who.

We liked the Christmas Special, we are very happy with where it appears that they are taking the next season of Doctor Who.  I won’t give away anything that might be a spoiler but something that we were really concerned about ended up not happening so we are very happy about that.

We played a little bit of Space Quest V tonight.  We are nearly to the end of that and looking forward to wrapping it up.