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December 15, 2017December 21, 2017

Hanging out in Sydney

Some pictures from our wanderings the last couple of days in Sydney.

We walked through the Royal Botanical Gardens on our way to Circular Quay. Australia has very few native succulents; they’re mostly from the Americas and Africa. But they thrive in the succulent garden here.

Succulent garden in the Royal Botanical Gardens.

View of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge from the Royal Botanical Gardens:

We took the ferry to Manly Beach on Thursday. View of the Harbour Bridge. Note that you can see some bridge walkers starting their climb on the left side of the bridge.

View back from the ferry ride.

We stopped by the Sydney Public Library where they run an exhibit of selected photos from the Sydney Morning Herald over the past 12 months. The main library is a beautiful space complete with old-school card catalogs.

Since I’m always hungry we got meat pies from a classic food cart.

On Friday night, we went to the Sydney FC vs Melbourne City FC football (soccer) match. Sydney won the league last year, and is at the top of the table after 10 matches this year. Melbourne was sitting 3rd.

Heading in…

1E115D15-AF37-4C1D-A8AF-3DE9B641F681 — Heading into Allianz Stadium for Sydney FC vs Melbourne City.

Sydney was strong in possession for the first five minutes, but Melbourne took over and dominated through most of the half. They had the best chances, including a 2-on-0 (!) break where the Sydney keeper made a brilliant save. Melbourne broke through in the 38th minute with a goal that was initially not awarded but given upon replay review. The ball hit the crossbar, deflected down, and hit inside the goal before bouncing back out (due to the spin on the ball).

It looked like Melbourne would take the lead into the half, but Sydney was awarded a free kick from just outside the box in the 45th minute and converted a beautiful shot to level the match. Then, in the closing moments of injury-time, a Melbourne defenser pulled down a Sydney player receiving a pass in the box giving Sydney a PK. They converted and took a 2-1 lead to the half.

Sydney was much stronger in the second half, and a frustrated Melbourne side took a red card in the 71st minute on an elbow to the head. This was also determined via replay. Sydney added a beautiful goal late in stoppage time to seal the 3-1 win.

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December 13, 2017December 21, 2017

An Ending and a Beginning

It was hard to leave Portland. We were able to connect with so many of our Portland friends of the last few weeks as we counted down the days to our December 11 departure. Nike threw me an awesome retirement party on Thursday November 30, and folks from all of my roles and teams over my 15 years at Nike came out. Thank you! Moovel threw Leena a goodbye party on Friday December 1 at a bar near the office and the whole gang turned out. We had our “Bon Voyage” party at Cardinal Club on Tuesday December 5 and so many of our friends stopped by (primarily from non-work circles). Everyone seemed to love our favorite neighborhood spot – go say hi to Tiare and Tim again sometime soon! Finally, the golf crew came out and played a final game with me on Saturday December 9. That was lots of fun, especially when Andiko and I both hit the flagstick on our approach shots on the last hole (#17 at Ghost Creek because of a shotgun start after a frost delay). Too bad we both missed our birdie putts.

A special thanks to Erik and Catherine, our landlords for the last seven weeks after we sold the house and moved into their ADU. We were their first renters, and it was mutually beneficial for us to help furnish the space with lots of our stuff (that we therefore didn’t have to figure out how to get rid of). Erik’s even going to be sporting plenty of “new-to-him” threads since he’s my clothing size.

I even sold my car the day before we left. I’d posted it on Nike classifieds, nextdoor.com, and our realtor Annette had posted it to her network of real estate professionals and their clients. No nibbles for a month, though I thought I’d priced it fairly. I’d managed to line up a friend to take care of the car and potentially sell it (thanks Eric!). I get an email through nextdoor.com on Saturday night with someone “very interested” in the car. He came by Sunday, test drove it, reviewed the maintenance records, and made an offer. We negotiated a bit and he came back with a cashier’s check a couple of hours later and drove my TSX away. The key to the deal? I had all the maintenance records (all through the dealership), proof of clean title, and repair records from two minor accidents. He said he’d been looking for a while for a car like mine but that NOBODY else could provide all the documentation. Sometimes being a nerd is good.

We got on a plane Monday a bit after 3p at PDX and arrived in Sydney a bit after 9a Wednesday (via Fresno and LAX). Where did Tuesday go?

We took the train to our rental’s neighborhood and killed a couple of hours with food and drink before checking in at 2p. We even found a spot we’d liked on our visit to Sydney in 2008.

It feels like the start of one of our many other travel vacations. I suppose it will take a bit for it to sink in that we’re not going back for quite a while this time!

December 8, 2017May 28, 2018

Career NBA Points

I’ve done some research on career NBA points leaders for an article I’ll post at the end of the season. But I wanted to point out a milestone LeBron James hit a couple of nights ago.

Here are the NBA leaders in points through each “Age x” Season:

Age    Player               Points
18     Kobe Bryant             539
19     Kobe Bryant            1759
20     LeBron James           3829
21     LeBron James           6307
22     LeBron James           8439
23     LeBron James          10689
24     LeBron James          12993
25     LeBron James          15251
26     LeBron James          17362
27     LeBron James          19045
28     LeBron James          21081
29     LeBron James          23170
30     LeBron James          24913
31     LeBron James          26833
32     LeBron James          28787
33     LeBron James          29492 (current season)
34     Kobe Bryant           31617
35     Kobe Bryant           31700 (Achilles injury)
36     Kobe Bryant           32482
37     Kobe Bryant           33643 (final season)
38     Kareem Abdul-Jabbar   35108
39     Kareem Abdul-Jabbar   36474
40     Kareem Abdul-Jabbar   37639
41     Kareem Abdul-Jabbar   38387

LeBron just passed Kobe (again) for the “Age 33” title. Kobe had 29484 points through his Age 33 season. Lebron now has the title for 14 consecutve seasons.

At the time he completed his seasons, Kobe held the title for every season he played – his Age 18 through Age 37 seasons. Remarkable. However, he’s been passed by players other than Lebron (just not by as much). He’s now as low as 5th: here’s the leaderboard for Age 23 season:

Player             Points
LeBron James        10689
Kevin Durant         9978
Carmelo Anthony      9264
Tracy McGrady        8542
Kobe Bryant          8197
...
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar  4957 (only his second season)

To date in his career, LeBron James has been the ideal combination of an early start, high productivity, and injury avoidance. He’s clearly “on pace” to break Kareem’s record, but Kareem’s late-career productivity is unparalleled. You know I’ll be watching.

December 2, 2017December 21, 2017

How To Invest

As we shared our plans to leave our jobs and travel indefinitely, we’ve had lots of conversations with friends about investing and early retirement. Here’s my primer on how to invest money.

I’ll start with an acknowledgement of my privilege. I’m a white male born in the US. My family paid for my private-school college education and I graduated debt free. An inheritance from a grandfather gave me a head start on investing in my 20s.

Leena also graduated debt free thanks to a combination of scholarships, family support, and jobs during college. She went on to finance her MBA by attending evening classes while holding a full-time job, working as a bartender, and earning additional scholarships.

When I was about 12, my mom went back to work full time. This changed how the household was run. My brother and I became responsible for things like our own laundry, and we were given an outrageously large monthly allowance for our age – I think it started at $100/month. But it came with a catch: we had to manage our finances. The allowance was to cover clothes, shoes, hair cuts, movies, eating out with friends, etc. Soon after, we had checking accounts and co-signed credit cards. Mom took some heat from parents of our friends when they found out how much money we were given the fact we had credit cards and had to explain the all-important conditions. I remember saving all winter one year for my first set of golf clubs. I think the irons were $425.

To date, I’ve only carried credit card debt one time. I ran short one month in college and couldn’t pay a card in full. I don’t think Leena’s ever carried credit card debt. We’ve had a friendly rivalry over who has a higher credit score through the years.

We’re off to a great start: we’re debt-free upon graduation, and we both have the financial literacy to live within our means (i.e. not take on debt).

My first job after graduation was at STATS, Inc. I started in July of 1994 at a sports-statistics company that was then centered on baseball statistics. The original product that launched the company tracked baseball data on a pitch-by-pitch basis. The data and resulting analysis were first sold to individual teams, and around 1987 they started covering every MLB game to have a complete data set. This provided all sorts of new ways to evaluate players and teams. Do you want to know how someone hits in a 2-strike count? How they hit in a “late & close” situation (something like 7th inning or later with the game within two runs)? STATS could provide that.

Then, a month into my career, baseball went on strike. This was the primary revenue source for the company! I was something like full-time employee #25 when I started. This small company was near the brink. Hiring and salaries were frozen. We learned later that the president of the company took out a second mortgage to help finance things.

This presented a unique opportunity. The company made privately-held shares of company stock available to employees for purchase. I consulted with mom and decided to buy. The company had a unique value proposition in the market and had been making money. The strike would be short term. I was young; I had plenty of investing years to make this up if the risk didn’t pay off. And the market as a whole couldn’t take advantage of this; only this very small subset of employees.

I invested, one of just two employees to do so. The baseball strike was resolved the following spring. The company, meanwhile, recognized the risk of having most of their revenue in one sport, and spent the baseball downtime building up operations to cover the NFL, NBA and NHL. A couple of years later, the company struck gold with a real-time football scoreboard on AOL. It became the 3rd-most visited destination on AOL on NFL Sundays. Soon after, NewsCorp (parent company of Fox Sports) acquired the company. My investment returned 15x in just two years.

The next lesson is to invest where you get maximum ROI. This sounds obvious, and it is! If your company offers a 401k with a matching contribution up to a certain percentage), that is an immediate, risk-free, 100% (!) ROI. It’s hard to do better. Nike offered a 5% match on 401k contributions while I was there, so the first dollars invested were 5% into the 401k.

Nike also offered an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) that was fairly typical as I understand them. You could deduct up to 10% of your gross pay to purchase Nike stock at a 15% discount. There were two purchase windows each year, and you actually got the 15% discount on the LOWER of the Nike stock price at the beginning and end of the window. So if the stock went up in the six-month period, you got the 15% discount PLUS any gains the stock made. This is another guaranteed positive ROI. I’ve also described it as an easy way to give yourself at least a 3% raise in salary (10% of your pay * 15% minimum ROI * 2 periods a year).

As you look at ROI for investments, you can also work on tax optimization. Traditional and Roth IRAs are different vehicles for retirement savings with different tax trade offs (pay now or pay later). There’s no simple answer, and the answer changes based on factors including how much you’re making, how old you are, when you plan to retire, and how much you plan to spend when retired. We’ve invested in both at different times over the years.

To recap my thoughts on how to invest:

Live within your means (positive cash flow); manage a budget
Pay off debt
Take calculated risks
Invest with maximum ROI
Invest to optimize taxes

In a future post or posts, I’ll cover how to determine how much you need to retire and link to some blogs that have been very inspirational and instructional to our journey.

November 28, 2017December 21, 2017

NU Football is at its Peak

Posted on insidenu.com:
https://www.insidenu.com/2017/11/28/16712264/nu-football-is-at-its-peak

With Saturday’s win against Illinois, we tied the program high for football wins in a four-year stretch:

Seasons    Wins    By Year
2014-17      31    5, 10, 7, 9
2009-12      31    8, 7, 6, 10
2012-15      30    10, 5, 5, 10
2008-11      30    9, 8, 7, 6
2007-10      30    6, 9, 8, 7

A year ago, I created a simple toy to give context on the state of the football program when answering a question like “What defines success this season?”

https://www.insidenu.com/2016/8/23/12618842/defining-success-for-northwesterns-2016-football-season

It’s a weighted moving average of wins (WMA Wins): 40% to the most recent season, then 30/20/10% to the seasons before that. (Caveat: Yes, there’s an advantage to today’s 12-game regular-season schedule, Remember, this is a simple toy.)

By the WMA Wins measure, which captures the current trend, we’re at an all-time high:

Seasons   WMA Wins
2014-17        8.2
2009-12        8.0
2007-10        7.6
2012-15        7.5
2006-09        7.5
1993-96        7.4

Win the bowl game and WMA Wins moves to 8.6. The football program is at its peak and the basketball program hit its peak last season (this season TBD). We have a new lakefront sports facility coming soon plus the basketball arena renovation. This is the best time to be an NU sports fan.

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.

September 29, 2017December 21, 2017

London, Paris, Bordeaux

We flew to London via Seattle on Monday/Tuesday, arriving about half 7. We had a 3p train to Paris, so with a few hours to kill, we took a train to central London (from Gatwick) and made our way to the Charles Dickens museum. It’s located in the first residence he had with his wife. We learned about his life, which included going to work in a factory at age 12 when his father was jailed in debtor’s prison. He only revealed this to a few close friends during his lifetime, but his works are full of his insights from the experience.

The train to Paris went through the Chunnel, which was pretty cool in theory. In practice, it’s just a long dark tunnel. But knowing you’re going under the North Sea to reach mainland Europe is alright. I believe France is now country #23 on my list of countries visited. Upon arriving at the train station, we bought another train ticket for a local train to the place we’d booked. We met our friends Keith & Naomi (they flew in from JFK and arrived a few hours before us) and headed out for dinner and drinks.

Day 2 in Paris was a LOT of walking. We went up a tower for a panoramic view of the city, crossed the river Seine multiple times, and enjoyed the Jardin du Luxembourg. Dinner wasn’t as good as the first night.

On Thursday, we caught the bullet train to Bordeaux, hitting speeds around 200 mph. We like Bordeaux. It has amazing architecture, many pedestrian-friendly streets, people out and about everywhere, and plenty of places to pause for food and/or drink.

Today, Friday, we drove our car out to Saint-Émilion – the heart of wine country. It’s a bit touristy, but what a postcard-perfect town! We (I) may have driven the rental car into a ditch (very obscured by weeds!) while trying to park on the side of the road. The front passenger side wheel may have dropped off the road, and the rear driver-side tire may have been a couple of feet off the ground. A friendly and helpful Frenchman may have stopped to give some assistance. I allegedly had Leena sit in the rear passenger side seat to help stabilize the car while the Frenchman pushed from the passenger side. A turn of the wheel while gunning it in reverse may have pulled it back out of the ditch.

This may have happened. Allegedly.

We did some tasting in town, mixing in a couple of cave tours. We had another great meal in Bordeaux tonight and are enjoying a Blanc de Noir we tasted and purchased in Saint-Émilion earlier today. We’re off to San Sebastián tomorrow.