18 Tuesday Jun 2013
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Sunset over Tossa de Mar (click to enlarge)
Don’t let us bore you. It’s just that Tossa de Mar on the Spanish Costa Brava is this incredibly charming place, so when our daughter Sybil came to visit, we had to take her there. She’s been around Europe a bit, but she’d never seen the Mediterranean, or a Roman ruin.
01 Saturday Jun 2013
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We Americans suffer unnecessarily when it comes to cell phones. Things are changing, but there is resistance. And why shouldn’t there be? There’s money to be had!
22 Monday Apr 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
I’m a Portland, Oregon native. Some say Portland is among the five best places to live in the world. Others say it’s where young people go to retire. That’s fine, but that’s not what Portland is all about. Portland is all about beer.
01 Monday Apr 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel, Video
We have just arrived at our apartment in Girona. We committed to this place for three months, sight unseen. It cudda been Hell, but instead it’s Heaven (especially at this height).
24 Sunday Mar 2013
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We have moved across town to our friend’s flat while she is in Hawaii so that the estate-sale people could organize and tag and display the things we left behind. Robin Caton, our sale maven, suggested I visit the sale at the opening minute – 9 AM – when the most…er, colorful…people push their way in after standing in a chilly early morning queue.
18 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
With a sigh of relief, everything destined for our storage unit is now there – and there’s room left over. It’s kismet. However, two disparate storage strategies have emerged, vindicating the Venus-and-Mars interpretation of the gender binary.
08 Friday Mar 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
A red letter day! We put the first boxes in storage. This gave Tom a chance to rent his preferred method of transportation, a pickup truck. (Tom and truck pictured above.) It was a black Nissan Zipcar named Florencia the Frontier. (If you don’t have Zipcars in your ‘hood, it’s an hourly vehicle rental service with cars parked conveniently around the city, and they all have names that go with their species, such as Harry Hundai and Felicia Ford. It’s adorable.)
18 Monday Feb 2013
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At last I have something in common with the great novelist Ann Beattie: an insatiable need for free boxes. She too is moving, and writes in the February 17th New York Times: “Boxes are much on the itinerant person’s mind. I brood about lost boxes, boxes I received via UPS — those Zappos boots! — that I stupidly took to the recycling center.”
11 Monday Feb 2013
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I mentioned, in my delirious tag sale entry, that we will spend our last ten days in Portland at a friend’s apartment….a crucial piece of the departure puzzle.
13 Sunday Jan 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
(We’re gonna hear from the bloggers about this…)
Hooray!!! We bought the plane tickets to Barcelona yesterday. They are one way! That is SO exciting!
The Expat Almanac 