Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my driving day.  Got up at seven, showered and was on the road just minutes before eight.  I had originally wanted to have been on the road earlier and to have gotten up at six but after being up until three in the morning packing this morning and needing to be able to drive all day I figured that four hours of sleep, rather than three, would be pretty important.

This is a very sad drive.  I am not going to see Dominica and the girls for two weeks or more.  Two weeks is the absolute minimum until they come down to Texas and very likely it will be a little bit more than that.    And this was supposed to be me driving Oreo back to Texas.

I hit Batavia at eight thirty and just a few minutes after nine I stopped at the Tim Horton’s on the New York State Thruway to pick up coffee and a breakfast sandwich.  Even having mentioned it several times recently, I still cannot get over how hot American coffee is made.  I was already at the next rest stop, the one at Angola, and the coffee still was too hot to even sip.

I saw a Lavazza (the big Italian espresso company) sign at Angola so I stopped again to grab espresso.  I was excited, having been in Europe all this time, to get good coffee in the States.  Boy was I disappointed.  The “barista”, if you could call her that, at the Lavazza completely burnt the coffee making espresso at the American temperature rather than the Italian one.  It ruined the taste of the coffee.  And the coffee was full of grinds.  This tasted nothing like real Italian coffee.  I am very surprised that Lavazza puts their brand on this.  This wasn’t just a store selling Lavazza, this was a Lavazza store!  This is Lavazza’s official representation in American.  Is it any wonder that Americans almost universally think that European coffee is awful?  If they intentionally ruin it when serving it in America of course we are going to have that impression.

It was a pretty good day for a drive.  Clear and warm.  For the first part of the drive I was not too tired.  On the drive I have been listening to Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” which is pretty long, nearly sixteen hours, and therefore pretty likely to last through my entire drive.  The drive is estimated at twenty-five hours long by Google Maps but when you take into account the starts, the stops, the time listening to music, time with nothing on while navigating and others you really only likely get half of that time as time to listen to books.

I crossed the Pennsylvania state line at eleven and into Ohio just twenty minutes later.  Ohio really does take forever and it was just after four thirty when I crossed into Kentucky at Cincinnati and Covington.

It was eight when I got to the EconoLodge by the Nashville Airport.  I got checked in, dropped off my luggage and had a few minutes to wait for James who was meeting me there so that we could go out for some food.

I didn’t have long to wait.  James met me and we drove to an Italian restaurant around the corner.  We talked for probably two hours. Maybe not quite that long.

I was off to bed early, probably around ten thirty.  Quite exhausted.  I have a lot of driving to do yet tomorrow.

 

I was back down at the Ralston’s this morning working on that server trying to get it up and running.  It didn’t take too long before we figured out that Radio Shack had mislabeled a part and that I needed to run back up there and get the right one.  Argh.  So I drove over to Geneseo.

After getting what I needed at Radio Shack I ran into Olympia Sports knowing that Rachael had to have the shift off today because of the wedding and ta da, there was Mary.  It is funny how Mary and I manage to find each other or run into each other, normally in Geneseo, year after year.  She was pretty surprised to see me.  We only had a few minutes to chat.  Now it will be another year before I see her again, at least.

Back to the Ralstons’ but there was not enough time to get the cable built and tested.  Art is going to do that later and I will work on it remotely.  We have everything that we need now so it will be fine.

I ran up to the house and we were out the door for the wedding by eleven thirty.  It was a busy morning.

We got down to the church plenty early.  We have to be there early because Liesl is in the wedding.  She is the flower girl, a critical role.  I am also in charge of pausing the music between the processional and the recessional.  Playing second fiddle to my daughter, again.

The service was very nice and Liesl did an excellent job.  All of the little kids were so cute.  After they were done with their jobs they all sat down at the feet of the wedding party and stayed there, more or less still, throughout the service.  It was darling.  For my part, the pausing of  the music that went fine in rehearsal yesterday did not work today and my Uncle Leo had to go bolting through the church to pause it manually in the back.

After the wedding Liesl was in for pictures with the wedding party and Dominica went with them as Liesl’s “handler”.  Probably a role she will have a lot over the years.  Dad came with me and we drove up to the Avon Inn for the reception.  The same Avon Inn where my senior prom was eighteen years ago.

Dad and I got there a little on the late side.  I had a beer and we hung out with the family out in the lawn.  Luciana, who was obviously with us as Dominica and Liesl were pretty busy in the “trolley” limousine with wedding party stuff, had a great time just walking around and meeting everyone.  She is always a hit.  Fourteen months always are.

I said it with Liesl, fourteen months was like the magic number when she went from seeming like a “baby” and being passive to being a “toddler” and being interactive.  Fourteen months seems to be when the fun really starts.

It wasn’t too long before the wedding party arrived and we went in for the reception.  Unfortunately Liesl was pretty worn out by this point and was having a bit of a tantrum and I had to remove her before the wedding party was even announced.  So I ran out the back door with her and she and I sat outside for quite some time while I waited for her to be in shape enough to be able to go back in.  So I missed nearly everything in the early portion of the reception.

By the time that Liesl and I walked back in to the Avon Inn there was already a pretty good line of people getting food.  We were seated at table one so we were among those already called so I took Liesl back to the table and immediately set about getting her and I some food.  Liesl, we think, has issues with low blood sugar and seems to have real issues if she does not get the right kinds of food at the right times.  We are working on that now that we have identified that as a problem.  That was a huge challenge for us while we were on vacation because her one consistent source of protein and nutrients is her fortified chocolate milk beverages that she got daily back in the States.

We ate dinner and soon thereafter dad wasn’t feeling too well so I left Dominica with the girls and drove dad back to his house, dropped him off and drove back to the Avon Inn.  I managed to arrive just in time to see the last minute of the father – daughter dance.  It took me a bit to find Dominica and the girls.  It turned out that there was a bathroom emergency and she was working on managing all of them.  So I ended up doing multiple sprints around the outside of the Inn trying to get to everyone.  It’s been a busy evening.

One of the people that we met at the wedding actually lives right around the corner from us in Carrollton.  Right next door to Chris who is watching our house,  in fact.  Well within an easy walking distance of our place.

We left the wedding just a tiny bit on the early side.  We were far from the first ones out but we were not the last.  We were totally tired and the girls needed to get to bed.  Both were long, long gone by the time that we got to the house.  I was able to carry them in and put them to bed without either one waking up.  Sadly, this was my last chance to see them for weeks.  After this I am starting my longest stretch ever without seeing my daughters.

Once the girls were in bed it was time to start the packing.  There was a lot to do and we wanted to load up the Acadia with stuff from the barn as well as just the normal stuff for me to take back with me.  Nothing like waiting until the last minute.

Dominica got all of the normal packing done then we went down to the barn together and started going through our stuff there.  Boy is there still a lot of stuff down there.  Who would have guessed that so much stuff could even still exist after all of the things that we have moved around over the years.  It continuously boggles my mind just how much stuff we actually own.

We ended up working on packing the Acadia until about three in the morning.  What was more important than the packing was that we managed to go through and eliminate far more than we packed.  We produced a whole bin of things to be donated to the rummage sale and many bins, six to ten bins, I would guess, of stuff to be thrown out.  We were throwing out a bit more than we were keeping.  That is a good ratio.  If we could just do that with the rest of our stuff that we still have there and that we have back in Texas we would be in great shape.

It was probably a bit foolish being up so late before I have to drive to Tennessee tomorrow but we were so productive.  This is the largest elimination of stuff from storage that we have ever done and there is more to do too.

If we didn’t own so many books maybe it would be easier.  The books certainly take up an insane amount of our space.  And there are so many more books than we realize.  Cookbooks, computer books, music books, novels, travel books, random books, etc.  Every box holds some set of books that we have totally forgotten.  And to think how many books we have thrown out over the years. It makes me sad.  We could have this immense library but we have nowhere to store them all and moving them is so hard.  And each year we use them less and less and we shift over to the Kindle and iPad for everything.  We almost never pull a book off of the shelf to read anymore.  Even ones that we own physically we often use their digital counterparts to actually read.

So it was three o’clock when I finally got to bed.  The car is jam packed with stuff and the barn is much closer to being empty than it has been in at least six years.  Tomorrow I have to get up early and start my drive south.

I went down to Danielle’s office to work on the SunFire V100 that we are trying to hook up there.  Jeremy was over as well.  He delivered donuts from Tim Horton’s in Geneseo for us.  We can’t get vanilla cream donuts down in Texas, or pretty much anywhere except for in New York, so that is a treat.  It is also a treat since I will be going back on my hard core diet very soon and I have very little chance left to eat real food before it kicks in.

We worked for a few hours.  Mostly talking.  A little bit of time trying to set up the V100 that is there.  It was a productive morning.

Dominica, dad and the girls went to Union Presbyterian Church in Leicester before noon as Liesl is the younger flower girl in Sara’s wedding tomorrow and today is her rehearsal.  Liesl remembers having been a flower girl last year but is bigger and much more able to follow directions now.

I went down and joined everyone a little bit later so that I could work and get things done.  Today is Friday so there is a bit of stuff at work for me.

I got down to the church with about half an hour of rehearsal left.  I drove dad’s Volvo convertible down.

From the church it was over to Perry to the Charcoal Choral for the after rehearsal dinner.  The dinner was in the exact same room, but quite a bit overhauled, where we had Dominica and my rehearsal dinner almost nine years ago.  Hard to believe that nearly a decade has passed since we got married!  Boy the time flies.  I’m not sure that I have done anything in that room, other than walk by it, in all these years.

We were really tempted by the drive-in’s lineup for tonight to come back.  It is Pixar’s Brave opening tonight followed by The Avengers which I do not want to see at all but Dominica really wants to see.  But we finally concede that we are already pretty tired and we would be really exhausted for the wedding tomorrow and that would lead to me being really, really exhausted for my drive from New York to Tennessee on Sunday.  So we are going to skip going to the drive-in this year.  That is sad as we did it last year and Liesl really enjoyed it and this was our chance to start making it a family tradition every summer in New York – a tradition that really goes back as long as Dominica and I have been together.

It was back to dad’s and back to work after coming back from the rehearsal dinner.  We were busy for most of the afternoon just doing stuff around dad’s house.

This evening Dominica and I drove over to Geneseo to do some shopping.  Dominica went in to Olympia Sports and just happened to find Rachael working so they talked for a while about shoes.  I ran over to Radio Shack to get a part that I needed to make a serial console cable for the server at the Ralstons’.  We were there for a bit and Dominica ended up buying a new pair of shoes while we were there.

We told dad that we would pick up dinner and suddenly we were hit with the desire to get Aunt Cookies’ subs!  Now that is a classic Geneseo treat.  It has been a really, really long time since I have had Aunt Cookies and after all of the food that we have had in Europe and a year on Medifast a real, authentic Western New York toasted sub sounds absolutely perfect.  We used to get Aunt Cookies all of the time when we lived in Geneseo.  That is something that I really miss.  Being from New York great pizza and subs are the staples of the diet.  Being without either in Texas is hard.

So we took the subs back to dad’s.  Dad was a bit surprised at our choice of dinner but seemed happy enough with it.  He doesn’t normally get this style of sub himself and I had gotten him a bologna sub which was something different as well.

 

After over a month in Europe it feels pretty weird to suddenly be back home in Upstate New York.  Almost surreal.  To think that yesterday morning I was in Lisbon, then was in London, then in New York City, drove past by house there that I haven’t seen in years but still own and then drove all the way to my childhood home where I am now.

It was a short night for all of us.  And we are fighting jet lag as we readjust to Eastern time.

We got up this morning and headed up to Geneseo for breakfast at the Omega.  I only get two days at home so we have to make the most of them.  The Omega has a new thing on the menu, a Veggie Bennie, which Dominica recommended that I try.  I am not sure how she knew about it but I gave it a try and it was pretty good.  It was similar to eggs Benedict, but vegetarian obviously, but not quite.  And instead of English muffins it was more like toasted flat-bread. A little odd but tasty.

After we were done with breakfast we went back to dad’s house and dropped off everyone and Danielle came up to help me to take the car back to Avis.  It was probably nine thirty when Danielle came up.  She drove the Acadia and I drove the awful rental and we went up to Marketplace Mall where there is an Avis in the Sears Autocenter right inside of the mall.  We had no idea that that was there.  Quite convenient for people coming from the Rochester southern area.  Much nicer than having to drive all of the way up to the airport which is normally what people do.

After dropping off the car we had to run to the Verizon store to get a replacement for Dominica’s phone, her HTC Incredible 2 Android phone having been smashed on the flight from London to New York.  This will be Dominica’s third phone in seven weeks.  She is going to be pretty tired of switching phones after this!

They are not cheap but we got Dominica an Apple iPhone 4S – that is one model up from mine which is an iPhone 4, this one having the faster processor and the ability to be used internationally.  There were not any problems getting the phone but, for some reason, they had all kinds of computer problems so it ended up taking about an hour and a half to actually do it.  In theory getting a mobile phone probably should not take that long.  But they had coffee, water or whatever we needed while we were waiting.

Verizon got Dominica’s new phone all set up and her stuff transferred.  We also bought an external battery that we can use for either of our iPhones which is good because without an interchangeable battery you do get stuck with a dead phone from time to time and there is very little that you can do about it.

Dominica told Danielle and I that she wanted a pink case for the iPhone and that she trusted our judgement.  Luckily for her we did some searching around and what the guy at the store did not show us, but we found anyway, was a pink Vera Bradley case for the phone!  Not only did we get it but it was the only one in the store.  So she is really lucky that it even existed.

We also got my iPhone turned back on while we were there.  So if you need to reach me, I get phone calls and texts again.  Actually this was a great example of how texting doesn’t work and should be avoided.  For the last month and a half any texts sent to me just vanished.  I’ll never know that they were sent.  Emails, however, would have reached me.  Texting is a fragile technology, email is robust.  This impacts anyone who has regularly changing phone numbers, international travelers, etc.  Many people function in a world of unstable mobile phones, or none at all, and using text instead of email means that those people have poor, or possibly no, means of communication.

From the Verizon store it was straight back to dad’s house to check in and to drop off Dominica’s new phone.  She was, indeed, quite excited to learn that we had found a Vera Bradley case, and in pink no less.  She had no idea that Vera Bradley was making iPhone cases now.  This is absolutely the very case that she would have wanted given the choice of any case ever.  So total score for me today.

After dropping off the phone Danielle and I drove down to Perry to deal with some banking there.  As we passed by the new coffee shop there we stopped for coffee, of course.

From Perry it was over to Pavilion to open a new bank account there.  The bank office in Pavilion is the old office of the Pavilion State Bank, the first bank that I ever used.  My first savings account was opened there was I was just five years old.  I still remember it well.  I remember getting my first deposit book and learning how to fill it out.  Learning how to use deposit and withdrawal slips.

We opened the account in Pavilion.  It is funny, after all of these years going back there and still everyone at the bank knows me.  It has been well over a decade, easily two decades, since I have banked there.  Just stepping inside brought back a lot of memories.

After the bank we ran across the square (yes, Pavilion has something of a square, it is quite odd) and picked up a pizza that was waiting for us.  We delivered the pizza back up the hill to my family waiting at dad’s.  Danielle returned home and I had lunch with the family.

A little less than an hour later I went down to the Ralstons’ to work for a little while out of Danielle’s office.  This is actually my first time, ever, seeing her office which is kind of weird if you think about it.

We probably worked for several hours.  I logged into the office from there as there is a workstation for me there that is handy.  We didn’t exactly get a lot of work done but it was effective time.  I managed to arrange a meet up with Dell in Nashville on Monday so that solidifies my travel plans.  Now I am going to be leaving Sunday morning from dad’s, as we always anticipated, but will definitely only be going to Nashville.  This was probably going to be necessary anyway as I am far more exhausted than I normally am before embarking on a drive of this magnitude and will not be any more rested by Sunday morning between the wedding stuff, work stuff, running around here at home, missing Oreo, jet lag and getting up early Sunday morning to hit the road.  I will be fine, but not thoroughly rested or anything of the sort.  I am dragging today very heavily.  My father is very glad that I know that I am breaking up the trip ahead of time.

Danielle also asked me to talk to someone either by phone or email at some point but I realized that he was in Nashville so I emailed him and made plans to meet up on Sunday night.  Suddenly I am being very productive indeed.

This evening was our time at the house as a family.  But we were off to bed very early.  We are exhausted.

 

It was a little bit painful pulling ourselves out of bed at four thirty this morning.  Not only are we generally exhausted but were up late last night getting ready for today and today is a really long, daunting day with nothing fun at all to look forward to so we just see this incredible death march stretching out in front of us.  Ugh.  Not what I want to do on just three hours of sleep.

We did pretty well getting moving and we were checked out of the hotel and hiking it up the hill to the bus stop at twenty till six arriving at the bus stop, a little bit tired, fifteen minutes later.  We sat and waited for the bus.

When the bus didn’t come, we started to panic.  This is the only form of public transportation that the city has and the six o’clock bus, already later than we had wanted, never came.  Now it was five after.  What do we do?

This was not going to be a good day.  We were really tight on time and stressed about this morning connection to the airport as it was.  That there was no train and no airport shuttle but just a normal city bus run and that it did not start running until thirty minutes after we had wanted to have left was bad enough.  But now even that bus doesn’t appear to exist.

We had very little choice.  I ran out into the street and flagged down a taxi.  The first taxi just drove away when he saw me coming.  Not a good sign.  The second taxi that I found was happy to take us to the airport, however.  So I jumped in and he drove me across the square to where Dominica was still standing with the girls – I had had to run some distance to get to a taxi.

We loaded into the taxi and sped off to the airport.  The upside is that we got to the airport very quickly and were there at least ten minutes or more before the bus would have gotten us there had there been the six o’clock bus and had it been on time.  Maybe we were as much as twenty minutes earlier.  It could not have been after six thirty when we got there.

Getting through Lisbon’s airport was not bad at all.  Even with only an hour and a half we were able to get through security and have a little time to sit at the gate before needing to board.  It was a really long walk to our gate, though, and we were pretty worn out by the time that we got there, mostly due to the stress of not having our bus show up this morning.

The girls wore themselves out playing at the terminal gate for a while.  Luciana just wanted to run down the long terminal back towards the airport and would do so any time that we let go of her.  Liesl was far more sedate.

The flight to London from Lisbon wasn’t bad at all.  Takes a little over two hours so we arrived near eleven.  The flight actually managed to get in on the early side.  This would seemingly be a good thing.  However, this is Heathrow that we flew into and coming in early is a little like not coming in at all – Heathrow is an antiquated airport from the dark ages (apparently built to house pigeons not airplanes) and a bus driver has to come out along with someone with stairs so that you can get out of your airplane in a different postal code than where the terminal is.  But London is the land of unions and no one does these things.

In our case, the bus came out to get us.  But we were left on the tarmac as no stairs arrived.  So we went from being early to being late while we waited for Heathrow ground crew to do the most trivial of duties.  Had we had all day and no worries about missing our next flight this would have been relatively trivial, but Heathrow is, by no small margin, the worst airport on earth and the time needed to make even a simple connecting flight on the same airlines can take a ridiculous amount of time.  We had two hours allotted only (it was British Airways the whole way through and Heathrow is their airport, why they felt that two hours was a plausible amount of time for a successful layover at Heathrow I don’t understand at all) so we were really worried.

The stairs finally arrived and we had to rush as quickly as we could to navigate the maze of confusion that is Heathrow.  It is truly amazing to attempt to describe the problems that Heathrow has.  Nothing is labeled and none of their staff have the slightest idea of what is going on.  The airport is packed with Heathrow employees lollygagging about with apparently nothing to do while the airport just falls apart.  Of course, as we learned six weeks ago when we arrived at Heathrow, getting the airport people to assist is even worse than when they do nothing since they will happily block you from your flight and, for example, direct you through the border instead or vice versa.

Having to take a bus to the terminal, a train to another terminal group, then another bus and really, really long walks to get to a gate means that even the most trivial transfer is onerous.  It took at least thirty minutes to do the American equivalent of “walking down the gangway.”  Thirty minutes to go one minute of distance.  At each bus we had to wait for fifteen minutes for the bus to arrive and then ride the bus for several minutes.  In America you could make a ten minute transfer in a pinch.  At Heathrow, I’d never want to make the attempt with less than four hours and even then would have concerns.

To make the transfer even worse, we had to go through security, again.  This makes sense but makes it really painful transferring in the UK.  Even though we had just gone through full security in Lisbon, never left the terminal, never entered the UK we had to go through security as if we had just arrived at the airport.  While this was decently fast and efficient it still adds ten to twenty minutes in the middle of your connection and makes you that much more likely to miss your flight.

If we didn’t know our way around the airport already, knew not to listen to the Heathrow staff who haphazardly directly you just anywhere to make themselves look busy when their manager walks by or didn’t basically jog through the airport you would never make your flight.  I can’t believe that British Airways plans for you to have to jog and panic just to make their flights.  That doesn’t seem like a good plan.

To add insult to injury, Heathrow forces you to walk through restaurants and retail outlets placed all along your path where you have no time to stop as you panic to get to your gate.  You can never safely stop because you never know if you are five minutes or forty-five minutes from your gate.  You cannot reliably anticipate if there will be another security checkpoint, another bus or whatever blocking you from progressing at an obvious speed.  So while you are starving and would love to stop at any of the delicious looking restaurants, you don’t have that option.  Instead they are just there to tease you as you are force to hurry past.

When we finally got to the gate it was so far from all of the food that we had no way to go get any of it.  It could easily have taken twenty minutes or longer to return just to get a pre-made sandwich or something.  There was a bar in our gate area but they did not have pre-made food and there was no way that we could risk having food made.  I took a walk through our entire gate area and found no food.  Dominica took a walk and found some bagged items inside a news shop hidden in the back.  So at least we had something.  Very, very poor, though.

At this point Heathrow has really driven the point home that no one is welcome at this airport and they truly feel inconvenienced to have people flying through there.  We are taking this to heart and will do everything that we can to avoid Heathrow in the future.  There are airports all over the continent into which we could fly much more conveniently.  No amount of British Airways having good customer service can overcome them using this pathetic airport.  BA should move to another airport entirely.  I can’t believe that they opt to fly their customers through Heathrow.  I’m truly surprised that the British government doesn’t shut it down as an embarrassment to the country.

We managed to make our flight, that was a huge relief.  This whole day has been just rushing and rushing.  This is our last critical connection – once we land in New York there is little that can go wrong as we have resources there and nothing to “miss” as we can do things like borrow cars, stay with friends, use credit cards, etc.  So once we boarded our 747 heading across the pond our comfort level went way up.

As we did on the last flight, we sat with me at the window holding Luciana, Liesl in the middle and Dominica on the aisle.  I prefer the aisle but Dominica overheats on flights much more than I do so I take the window seat.

This flight had in-flight entertainment and I managed to watch Journey 2 which was a cheesy, but fun, movie taking a tip from Jules Verne and other contemporary writers and pretending that they were all, in actuality, writing about the same topic and that all of their works were actually meant to go together and that they were clues leading explores to a lost island in the Pacific.  A pretty odd premise and the movie was incredibly light.  There was no doubt that the movie was primarily shot for the purpose of showing off 3D effects and at times you felt like you were sitting in Disney World at one of their 3D movies that were made, long ago when 3D was a novelty, just to be silly with 3D.  It was incredibly distracting and you know that it is bad when you know that that is what they are doing and you don’t have access to a 3D view of it.

I also managed to watch the second Sherlock Holmes movie.  It too wasn’t bad.  It wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t bad.  I have not seen the first movie so likely that would have improved it to some degree but the movie was really weakly directed and was just too obtuse to be really good.  But it was fine and it helped to pass the time.

I actually pulled off watching three whole movies on the flight.  The last one being This Means War which I had never heard of before but it had Chris Pine who I normally enjoy and it was very lighthearted.  Again, it wasn’t a very good movie.  In fact, it was incredibly dumb.  But it wasn’t particularly bad and was fine for passing the time on a trans-Atlantic flight.  With three movies to watch the flight actually passed quite quickly for me.

The girls did really well today.  For a long time Luciana actually fell asleep in my arms so that I could not move for many hours – thank goodness for the in-flight movies!!  Liesl was so good, keeping quiet, playing with her toys and watching shows while we flew.  I can’t believe what good travelers we have.

Just as we came in to New York I reached into my pocket to pull out the HTC Incredible 2 Android smartphone that we have been using for the last six weeks while we have been in Europe.  If you remember we had to get this phone specifically for this trip and it was a total panic at the last minute.  We were very sad that we were stuck using an Android, rather than an iPhone, while in Europe but we only needed the Android to make it until we returned to the States because Dominica’s account was up for renewal on the 19th (that was yesterday) so she could get herself an iPhone 4S the moment that we returned.  Keep that in mind when I say that… I reached into my pocket and jabbed my thumb with glass.  That’s right, the Android, in the last moments of our European vacation, had somehow shattered in my pocket without me knowing it.

I was actually able to power on the phone and carefully post, having to move my fingers between broken bits of glass, on Facebook that we had landed and that the phone was broken.  Then I put it into a plastic bag and stowed its remains away.  We won’t be needing that phone again.  Ever again.  I guess I know what I will be doing tomorrow.

Landing in New York was nice.  We have been looking forward to being back home for a while.  US Border Control was a breeze.  They have improved that a lot over the years.  It used to be quite scary coming back to the US for US citizens.  Now it is comfortable and fast.

It took a really long time to get our luggage, but that should be expected, I would think when dealing with a fully loaded 747 since there is just so much luggage to move around.  It probably took us nearly an hour to get out of the airport, maybe even more, but we are home in New York and we have all of our luggage.  At the end of the day nothing really went wrong which was pretty amazing.  Even the stroller, which we had checked at the end of the gangway in Portugal made it out in New York.

Once we had our luggage we made our way to the airtrain that took us out to Federal Circle.  At Federal Circle are the car rental places for JFK and Avis was there with the car that we had reserved yesterday.  Unfortunately instead of a Chevy Cruze we got saddled with a Dodge Avenger – quite literally the worst car that I have driven in years.  The car felt like a hobbyist project to see if high school kids could build a working car in a weekend.  And the answer is, they can’t.

The Avenger was horrible to drive.  It shook like it was going to fall apart and it could not hold the road for anything.  Any slight turn of the wheel would send the car wobbling this way and that.  It was terrifying to drive and had so little power that it was all that it could do to merge onto the highway.  The shaking was so bad that when around forty miles per hour or higher I could hear Dominica struggling to breath as the car shook the air out of her breath by breath.  If you talked there was a slight effect like someone speaking into a car.  All from the pathetic suspension.  This is pretty much my impression of Dodge vehicles so I was not totally surprised but even for my low expectations of things made by Chrysler this was dramatically poor.

We left the airport with the fully loaded, sad little excuse for a car (or go cart, I’m not sure how it is classified)  and ended up going right into New York City rush hour traffic.  That kind of sucked.  So it took quite a while to work our way off of Long Island and up to Westchester County.

The drive north took us pretty close to our house in Peekskill.  Boy is it weird driving right past the old place.  What makes it so incredibly weird is that we still own that house but someone else has lived in it nearly twice as long as we ever did.  And, we believe, they just renewed their lease for another year so they will soon have lived there three times as long as us.  It has been quite some time since I was last down in Westchester and the Hudson Valley.  I’m not even sure that I have driven through here since getting the last of my stuff out of storage.  It might have been quite some time.

Dominica and the girls were totally exhausted.  It was around six o’clock local time when we were starting to drive but the jet lag has our internal clocks set to think that it was closer to eleven or midnight so they were passing out.  Dominica passed out pretty quickly and slept pretty solidly for quite some time.

Dominica really wanted to go see her parents and the rest of her family who are all up in Frankfort.  So she had me drive up the northern route taking the New York State Thruway rather than the far more direct route through the Southern Tier so that we could stop for a while and visit in Frankfort.  She promised, after I had informed her that there was no way that I would have the energy to drive all that way after having stopped for a while to visit given the jet lag and how long we had been up, that she would be all set to drive back to Rochester after that point, about another three hours.  We had discussed all of this prior to being in the car so this was not a spur of the moment decision.  I really did not want to add time but she was extremely adamant about wanting to see her family.

Dominica woke up around nine while we were a bit south of Albany.  That is when it hit her just how late it was already and how late it was going to be as the night stretched out in front of us.  She called her family and they were all going to be in bed by the time that we would be coming through Frankfort.  So we are not able to stop and need to go straight on to dad’s place.

The detour, which we didn’t need to do, added about an hour and a quarter of extra driving to the trip.  So instead of just over six hours it was nearly seven and a half hours of road time.  A really, really long evening.  Dominica felt really bad once she realized how far we were driving and that she was so tired that she could not even remotely have driven any of it.  So she went back to sleep and I trudged on.

It was pretty late, between one and two in the morning that we pulled into dad’s place.  The drive went okay but it was a struggle.  I was really exhausted and never got any chances to nap or anything all day.  When you add in that we only slept three or four hours at best last night, got up really early and traveled non-stop for the following twenty-six or twenty-seven hours you can appreciate why I was so exhausted when we got home.  Dominica and the girls managed to pull off several hours of sleep in the car while I drove.

Both girls were able to be transported to bed without waking up.  We unloaded just the minimum from the car and hung out with dad for just a little bit.  Then it was off to bed.

So the trip is completely over.  We are now back home, safe and sound.  Our luggage is worn out, completely shot.  The phone has been destroyed.  My second pair of shoes were abandoned in Lisbon having fallen apart.  I lost my nice fleece on the train in Germany about a month ago.  None of us want to wear the clothes that we have had on in Europe this past month ever again.

It is going to take a while for our brains to go back and compile this mammoth trip into something comprehensible.  Already I am having a hard to placing events into any logical order.  Time moves very oddly when you are traveling at such a pace.  We are extremely thankful that I was taking such meticulous notes during the trip or we would be completely lost now.