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.)
05 Tuesday Mar 2013
“Shambles” is much too nice of a word to describe our apartment — or our lives, for that matter — as we remove our worldly goods from closets and shelves and box them up for sale and storage. In a two-minute video, Louise conducts a tour of our Portland apartment — or what’s left of it — 25 days before we begin the expat life.
27 Wednesday Feb 2013
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
“Won’t you get tired of good weather all the time?” That was my friend Doyle, an Oregon native like me – and like me, a man of webbed feet and hooded raincoats.
18 Monday Feb 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
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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
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
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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.
06 Wednesday Feb 2013
While Louise and I dance on the rim of sanity, impatiently contemplating our departure 52 days from now, a brief diversion…
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!
01 Tuesday Jan 2013
Posted in Sentiments
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31 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Travel
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We had a chance to go to a Rick Steves lecture the other night, though lecture is way too stuffy a word for it. The celebrated travel journalist, broadcaster, and entrepreneur actually has a bit of a stand-up routine that he brings around: part advice, part humor, and part low-pressure sales pitch for his tours and travel products. Rick was in jeans and a sport coat, standing taller than we expected, blondish hair going silvery, and much funnier than one would imagine.
06 Tuesday Nov 2012
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
I was chatting with my son Ted about our adventure, and admitted I was a little scared. (Don’t worry—I have run all the cognitive therapy questions and I know intellectually that leaving home is no scarier than staying home. But I will allow myself to be scared anyway, because it’s a normal reaction to a big forthcoming change.)
The Expat Almanac 