October 2017 – allthingsfaust.com

October 29, 2017November 9, 2017

The Big Trip

It was six or seven years ago. I was running some numbers and making projections and told Leena that we were on track to retire early. Sometime in our mid-50s looked reasonable. We’ve long planned on traveling extensively in retirement, and likely not having a permanent base. Leena countered: Why don’t we take a few years off in our 40s and travel? Like many things, travel will get more difficult as we age.

So that became the plan. We decided to let a few timelines play out. Leena was at a promising startup (GlobeSherpa) and had some equity, and we wanted to see if that might pay out. It did; they were acquired in July of 2015 and Leena got her final payout from the acquisition at the end of 2016. We still had Milo, and we weren’t going to leave while he was still around. Milo passed in April of 2016. That left one final carrot. If I stayed with Nike through August 30, 2017, I’d earn my 15-year sabbatical (five weeks) and qualify for early retirement (the primary perk is employee pricing for life). The plan has become reality.

We did a final project on the house in the spring – new roof and gutters – and listed the house in June. We got an offer in early August and closed on Monday, September 25. We had a lot of downsizing to do after 16 years in the house! We had a “shop our house” party and invited Portland friends to come by and make an offer on most anything. There were many runs to Goodwill, and a couple of runs to the dump. We lined up a short-term rental for our last couple of months that’s worked out great. It’s a small ADU with a kitchen, small sitting area, full bathroom and a loft bedroom. We moved stuff over as we neared the closing date and made a final trip the morning of the close. Then we took a Lyft to the airport for the two-week Europe trip (the last two weeks of my sabbatical).

We’ve both given notice to our employers that Friday December 1 will be our last day. And we’ve booked our one-way tickets out of Portland for Monday December 11. The first stop?

Fresno!

It’s all led up to this exciting destination! We’ll spend two hours there, then fly to LAX and on to Sydney. We’ll likely spend a week or two in Sydney and then head to Bali. From there, the plan is intentionally open-ended.

We first talked about traveling for a year while chasing the sun. But then we realized that returning to Portland in December was heading into six months of rain. So the plan is for about a year and a half on the road. As we explore, we’ll “settle down” for a month or more at a time in certain spots. We’re not in a rush, and traveling to new spots every few days or even weeks would be pretty exhausting!

If your plans include travel and would like to meet up, get in touch and let’s make some plans! We’ll be posting more often here as we explore and make decisions on destinations.

October 5, 2017December 21, 2017

London

We took a quick – and cheap! – 90-minute flight from Bilbao to London on Tuesday. We hopped on the Underground and headed into central London. We met up with Keith and Naomi at the Airbnb in Chinatown. We met a former colleague of Naomi’s for drinks at the pub, grabbed some dinner, and had a nightcap back at the flat while catching up on travels from the past week. While we went to Bordeaux, San Sebastián and Bilbao, Keith and Naomi headed to Normandy.

Chinatown:

We ventured out on Wednesday and walked to Big Ben, Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Leena and I hopped on a boat and road down the Thames to the Tower Bridge. The tour commentary was excellent. I’ve found city boat tours to be a very good way to see a city (architecture tour in Chicago; duck boat tour in Boston).

The Tower of London:

The Tower Bridge. To its left is the Shard, now the tallest building in Western Europe. To its right is a building nicknamed the Walkie Talkie.

On Thursday, we headed to the Chelsea neighborhood. After a stroll across the Thames and through Battersea park, we stopped for lunch at a pub founded in 1866. Traditional fish & chips hit the spot. We then headed to Stamford Bridge for a tour of Chelsea FC’s home pitch.

OK, we actually headed there since they signed me. A shot from my introductory presser:

And that’s pretty much a wrap for this trip. We head back tomorrow…

October 3, 2017December 21, 2017

San Sebastián and Bilbao

We took a BlaBla ride from Bordeaux to San Sebastián. It’s a car sharing service in Europe where we paid €13 each to ride in the backseat of a guy’s Hyundai as he made the trip. Except he stopped about 15 minutes short of San Sebastián and dropped us in a Burger King parking lot with a goodbye and good luck. We got a local to call us a taxi and it cost €33 to complete the trip. But considering a bus would have been €60 each and would take 5 hours, we got there in half the time for half the cost.

The car rental place in San Sebastián was located in a mall parking lot, which seemed to confuse the taxi driver. He picked us up at a random Burger King parking lot to take us to a mall. But we got the car and found our Airbnb without too much trouble. Lucky us, the car came with navigation or we would have had to find wifi. The navigation was a bit tricky though. It’s all in Spanish, and we could never figure out how to zoom the view. So we were mostly looking at a map zoomed out to show half of Spain (not very helpful) that would jump to a street view a few seconds before each turn. Exciting!

San Sebastián is where a Hollywood director created the perfect seaside European city but took it a bit too far. Sure, let’s have a harbor with a long, perfect crescent beach. Let’s drop an island at the entrance to the harbor to shield it from the rough ocean. We’ll put high hills at each end to frame the harbor. We’ll drop a town behind the beach with beautiful architecture, and we’ll build a wide promenade along the beach dotted with bars and cafes so people can stroll beside the beach, enjoy the beautiful views, and have a nosh and a drink.

So, we took advantage of all that even though it was an overcast day. The morning rain petered out and it was lovely to stroll around in the afternoon. Those glasses of wine along the beach? Just €1.50. We may have stayed for a second glass.

We rode the funicular to the top of the hill on the west side of town for a panoramic look at the over-the-top-this-can’t-be-real city.

We drove to Bilbao on Sunday with a 2p ticket to the Guggenheim. We arrived about 1p and drove to our Airbnb where we were told there was “plenty of parking”. While that was true – there were many spots – they were all taken! We drove around for about 20 minutes before finding a spot. Of course by then, on twisting, hilly, and mostly one-way city streets, we didn’t know exactly where we were relative to the Airbnb. We put the address in the nav, but that only gave a super-zoomed out view and the next turn. Lucky us, it turned out we were one street over but had to go down a flight of stairs between streets. So that worked out!

The Guggenheim is an amazing building and I enjoyed learning about the design and build process from the audio tour. The exhibits were hit and miss for me, as they always are at museums. Most are a miss, but there were a few interesting pieces. The city was mostly shut down on Sunday night, but we found a few bars with pinxtos (the Basque word for tapas) to nosh on.

We did laundry on Sunday and after washing our clothes, couldn’t get the dryer to start. An email to the host confirmed that it didn’t work. So we had to hang our clothes out the 7th floor window. At least they were under a tarp since a light rain was falling.

We drove about an hour and 15 minutes to Rioja on Tuesday. We made the rounds on Calle Laurel, eating tapas and sampling a few wines. Note that the glasses of wine cost less than a bottle of water!

We wandered the town for a bit and found a tourism office that gave us a few options for wineries we could visit. The first was closed, but we struck gold at Bodegas Ontaño. We arrived about 15 minutes before a tour they’d scheduled with some Germans. We were invited to tag along. It’s a modern operation with 36 (!) 50000 (!) liter tanks and a massive barrel room. They have some beautiful artwork. We heard the story of one painting that was lent to the Vatican for a few years, and when it came time for its return, they had to sue to get it back. We tasted through a white, their house red, their reserve red, and their grand reserve red. The reserve and grand reserve are only made with “excellent” vintages. The reserve must spend two years in barrel and 3 years in bottle before release while the grand reserve must spend two years in barrel and 5 years in bottle before release. The ones we tasted were from 2010, the last excellent vintage, and in the case of the grand reserve, just released. These were a treat!

A shot of Rioja from the drive home.

October 1, 2017February 11, 2019

Drew’s countries

I’m going to list them in the order visited…

1. United States. 1972. I was born here!

2. Canada. 1983. We went to Niagara Falls, and during the trip, the Army Corps of Engineers blew off Terrapin Point. Here’s a cool tidbit: we had a home movie camera with us and the parents set it up on the hotel balcony and filmed the explosion. I couldn’t find any video on YouTube. I should probably see if the parents still have it and try to get it posted. The best way to watch the video? In reverse (which was easy on the old reel to reel spools). Pretty cool to watch a bunch of dust rush to the ground and then have rocks slide up a hill from rubble into a beautiful point.

UPDATE (2018): Dad has a box of our old home movies that I can go through someday to see if I can find this video. But I’ll need to find a projector to view them…

3. United Kingdom. 1988. This was the bell tour summer after sophomore year of high school, I had my first beer in a proper pub in London (shh, don’t tell the chaperones). Fittingly, it was a Faust Lager.

4. Switzerland. 1990. This was the bell tour summer after senior year of high school, 1990. Lots of great memories from that trip including a hike to the first base camp on the Matterhorn (from Zermatt) where Steve and I hammed it up in a great photo that I think Kevin Geiger snapped…

5. Germany. 1990. Bell tour.

6. Austria. 1990. Bell tour.

7. Costa Rica. 2000. Honeymoon! Leena takes me traveling internationally for the first time.

8. India. 2004. We covered a lot of ground over three weeks: Delhi, Agra (Taj Mahal), Bombay, Ahmedabad, Modasa, Udaipur, Goa, and Kerala.

9. Netherlands. 2004. This was the first of several business trips to Nike’s European Headquarters in Hilversum.

10. Spain. 2006. We made a quick overnight trip to Madrid from Nike’s EHQ to visit retailers in Madrid. In 2018, we spent time in Spain in October and November on either side of going to Morocco for the first time.

11. Belgium. 2007. A day trip from Nike’s EHQ to Antwerp to visit retailers.

12. Thailand. 2007. I was invited to give a session at Nike’s Asia Pacific sales conference covering features of our newly upgraded portal on nike.net. Leena came over at the end of the week and we added a week’s vacation in Bangkok and Phuket.

13. Australia. 2008. This was our first trip on miles, and the first trip I blogged. I negotiated with work to get three weeks off (normally two is the limit for one stretch) by leaving just before Christmas. I got seats to Sydney (from San Francisco) on the first call (a year in advance) and was told to call back in three weeks for return seats. I did, but no seats were available. I called multiple times each week and soon had the request down pat: any two seats from anywhere in Australia or New Zealand plus or minus a week of our target date, to anywhere in the US. In April, there were two seats from Auckland to Los Angeles on the “plus one week” date (making it four weeks off work). I booked it and asked forgiveness from the boss.

What I didn’t know is that with miles, they book you door to door. So a little work with Alaska and they’d added flights from Portland to San Francisco, Sydney to Auckland (a little over half way through the trip) and Los Angeles to Portland. For no extra miles. And because we’d lived in San Francisco, we booked an early Saturday flight to spend the day with friends (our Sydney flight departed near midnight). Lucky we did! On the day we left Portland, snow was falling and the airport closed for several days just a couple hours after we left. They ran out of de-icer.

14. New Zealand. 2009. This might be my favorite country. The Routeburn track is an all-time highlight. Auckland is great.

15. Mexico. 2009. It took a long time to get to our nearest neighbor to the South. This was the year we did Christmas with Leena’s family. Since everyone agreed that Chicago was too cold in December, we all flew to San Diego and drove down to Ensenada for the week. I’ve since been back twice: to Mexico City and Huatulco in 2015 and through Mexico City en route to Cuba in 2016. We caught the Adele concert in Mexico City in 2016 which was, as expected, fantastic.

16. Argentina. 2010. A great trip to such a large and diverse country. We got our urban fix in Buenos Aires, wine country in Mendoza, the tropics at Iguazu Falls, and snow-covered hikes in Patagonia.

17. Chile. 2010. On the Argentina trip, we jumped over to Santiago for a weekend. Great city.

18. Kenya. 2013. The start of our Africa trip with two amazing safari camps.

19. Zimbabwe. 2013. Victoria Falls and rafting the Zambezi.

20. Botswana. 2013. Two more safari camps.

21. South Africa. 2013. Beautiful Cape Town and Johannesburg.

22. Panama. 2014. We did the tourist triangle: Panama City (and the canal), Boquete (mountain town) and Bocas (beach town).

23. Cuba. 2016. I’m not sure why I didn’t blog anything about this! We visited Havana and Viñales.

24. France. 2017. Our current trip. We just left today after visiting Paris and Bourdeaux. We drove to northern Spain.

25. Indonesia. 2017. After a week in Sydney, we headed to Bali for ~7 weeks early in our Big Trip.

26. Singapore. 2018. We did a quick weekend in Singapore to reset our Indonesia visas (valid for 30 days).

27. Fiji. 2018. We stopped in Fiji for a week in March on the way from New Zealand back to the US.

28. Guatemala. 2018. After a couple of weeks on the Yucatán peninsula we headed a bit further south.

29. Belize. 2018. We were two of three passengers on a small plane ride from Guatemala City to Belize City. We then hopped a ferry to Caye Caulker and spent a week on an island without cars with the motto “go slow.”

30. Portugal. 2018. After a one-day layover in London, we caught a flight down to Porto to start a couple of months in the Southwest of Europe and Northern Africa.

31. Morocco. 2018. We jumped over from Spain and explored Marrakech and Fez along with some day trips to other cities and towns.

32. Columbia. 2019. We spent a month (February into March) exploring.