On The Road Again

So glad to know that you are home safe again, @Ken Anderson ! It sounds like it was a long and bothersome expedition for you; but at least you helped your friend get moved, and that was what you set out to do.
Hopefully, you could relax on the train trip back home.
I love traveling on the train, and one of my best trips was a cross-country one from Idaho to Richmond, VA, when Robin was stationed at Ft. Eustis and I went to visit her.

 

Everyone was complaining about the Internet so I don't think that it's a regular thing for it not to work. Unfortunately, this was the first time I have traveled via Amtrak in a few years so it wasn't a good experience. Otherwise, the train trip would have been pleasant enough. I have traveled Amtrak via sleeper car, business class, and coach, and was not overly impressed with coach, as it was very much like a bus. Had the Internet worked, business class would have been great for the length of the trip I was taking but, for longer trips, I prefer a sleeper.

 

Sleepers are awesome, plus they come with free steak dinners everyday (or whatever else you want for that meal). When I was coming out on the trip to visit Robin, they gave her an option to upgrade my ticket on the last part of the trip, so I had the sleeper unit. I mostly had snacks and had brought along bunches of protein bars, so all I had to buy on the train was my morning coffee to go along with the protein bar; because any food on Amtrak is very expensive.

 

The cicadas were almost deafening in Maryland, however.

 

If it hadn't been for the problems getting there (flights canceled and several hours sitting around an airport with a dumb-ass mask on), and the lack of Internet access on Amtrak (as well as the dumb-ass mask), it would have been better. Actually, moving boxes, and particularly carrying twenty boxes of books up two flights of stairs to his office in his new church, are things I'd rather not ever have to do again. It turns out, driving the truck to Maryland was the best part, and that was the part I was worried about. Plus, it was extremely hot in both Pennsylvania and Maryland and, although I thought he was a Baptist pastor, he must have turned Mormon because there wasn't a cup of coffee to be found. I think I had one cup of coffee in three days.

 

Of course, being backward states, neither Pennsylvania nor Maryland stock Moxie in their stores, either. It was a nightmare.

 

Rather than going to our timeshare in Virginia this year, we've traded our points in for one closer to home, near or in Bethel, Maine. We will be leaving on Friday and arriving the same day, to spend a week in a timeshare there. I think it's one we've stayed at before and didn't buy, but it's pretty nice. Other than going out for breakfast or dinner more often, we generally do pretty much the same things when we're in a timeshare that we do when we're home, so you can expect to see me here every day, but a bit less so on Friday since it's a fairly long drive, although not as long as Virginia.

 

And we're home.

 

Wednesday, we'll be heading off to the Washington, DC area for a week. The hotel we usually stay at - The Virginian in Arlington - seems to be closed, or full, I'm not sure, because Michelle makes those arrangements, so we'll be staying somewhere else, not in D.C. but nearby. When we return, we'll be bringing our nephew with us. He just graduated from high school and is thinking of working and attending school in Maine, so I think he wants to see if he'll be able to survive a Maine winter, as he has only lived in North Carolina and a place that I can neither spell nor pronounce near Baltimore.

We'll be taking a train from Portland, which will be easier and cheaper, since hotels in the D.C. area charge per night for parking spaces, and it's a nightmare driving around that part of the country, at least when you're not from there. In the past, we have parked our car (at $15 per day) and used Uber to get around.

I'll be turning my office back into a bedroom and moving into another part of the house that used to be my office, which I moved out of because it is directly off of the front door so I was feeling like a doorman. Although any visitors that we get are usually here to see Michelle (she's much more sociable than I am), I was having to get up all the time to answer the door. But we don't have as many visitors anymore as we used to because they usually catch her at her recovery center, so it should be okay.

I was hoping to have everything moved before we left but - surprise, surprise - I procrastinated and will have to get as much of it done as I can tomorrow, and our nephew is going to have to put his own bed together because it's still in a box.

 

Yeah, I'll probably play the senior citizen thing, and make him do all the shoveling. Actually, I am thinking about roping him into doing a winter camping expedition and pretend that it's something I do all the time.

Ella is probably going to hate him for the first couple of weeks, while Bubba will be scared for a couple of minutes, and then be over it.

 

Not a good start. I brought my Chromebook, my new Kindle-10, and my iPhone - or so I thought. In reality, I brought my older Kindle-10 that crashed during an update, and what I thought was my iPhone 12 Pro was actually an old kindle that apparently doesn't even work. Having found it while moving things around to make room for our nephew, I charged it overnight in the same place I usually charge my iPhone, which is why I thought it was my iPhone.

I did bring my Chromebook but my Google password, which was written down and stored in case, doesn't work for some reason, although it worked a few days ago. Since I don't have my iPhone, I can't even retrieve my password.

So I am on a guest account on my Chromebook, which lets me get online but I can't save anything like a text file, so I am trying to get some work in my Aviva Directory job by sending the text to myself in an email, using a Gmail account that Michelle created in Bubba's name.

Once I get to Virginia, I might end up buying a Windows laptop.