Thoughts about driving

Sooz and I talked about the Big Drive she just completed.

It was clearly more expensive than flying, which would have cost her and Grant maybe £250 round-trip. In total, the bill for driving was at least £1000 for the ferry boats, parking at Stavsnäs, gas, etc. It also took 6 days, rather than the 6 hours of a round-trip flight. The drive itself was also unedifying; mostly freeways, and nothing really scenic.

On the other hand, Sooz and Grant got to visit Marcia's family (twice) and experience the vastness of the markets in Kiel. And we transported Ollie relatively stress-free, plus we carried a hell of a lot of stuff in the car.

Overall, though, we won't drive next year. Even if we bring Ollie, the total airfare for four of us will be cheaper than driving, with a lot less time spent in transit. And since our house is pretty much finished, we're in the happy position of needing to bring only food out with us, rather than our usual loads of building stuff and furnishings.

Twitter

I've signed up for Twitter today. My football club has started using it to communicate news to their fans, so I thought I'd give it a try. I've also activated it on my phone.

There's a spot on the right side of the blog which will show my latest 'tweets'. I thought it might be a good way to separate the little news items from the more substantive posts.

At the moment, it's experimental. Comments welcomed.

UPDATE: My niece in Minneapolis is on Twitter and we're following each other now. Apparently, however, direct messages between us (the ones prefaced with "@") also show up on the blog. Not sure I like that...a little too much sharing, perhaps.

They're home!

Sooz, Grant, and Ollie all arrived safely around 11:00. The photo shows the exact moment of arrival. The car was filled mostly with dirty laundry and booze!

Sooz is cleaning the kitchen now (apparently, I didn't do well enough), Grant started playing Halo about 5 minutes after walking in the door, and Ollie is in the shade with his favourite tennis ball.

A couple new photos are now in the midsommar gallery to end up our 5 week advanture!

The best-laid plans...

Well.
Unfortunately I got a tad lazy after being out in Paradise for a month, and I thought we could just sashay back into Blighty on our good looks alone. Sadly, not only had I failed to book our Channel crossing in advance, thus incurring a ridiculously inflated charge of more than double what we had paid coming over, I had also forgotten that Ollie had to have his worm pill/ tick & flea treatments administered at least 24 hours before returning to the UK.

Having gotten this accomplished only this morning in Holland, he was denied entry when we showed up at the Eurotunnel around 1PM.

Oy. Let's just say that I was NOT the most popular family member today. After the horrid reality of the situation set in (i.e. being stranded in Calais for almost 24 hours), we went about securing our teensy, tiny room at the local inn (The Kyriad) in Coquelles, a seemingly "new" town that has sprung up since the opening of the Chunnel.

The neighborhood is actually rather cute, bordering on farm land, with neat and tidy little houses festooned with summer flower boxes. Our room, however is minute, and the three of us are cheek by jowl this evening, as we play Skip-Bo on the beds.

To kill time this afternoon, I left "the boys" and drove the 5 minutes to the Cité de l'Europe Monster Shopping Center, to see what was on offer. I left an hour later...in despair. If you can imagine the worst in both UK and US mall shopping experiences, then you're spot on! Maybe I'm past my shopping prime-or is it really that horrible out there? Ugh.

Good news however, we have gleaned several bottles of interesting wines from various stops along the way down from Kiel.....and if all goes well, we will be back HOME tomorrow!

A clarification

Although I am a 50 year-old man, and I was in Sweden last week, I was never in Örebro and certainly not on a bicycle.

UPDATE: I just noticed this was the 500th post. Congratulations (and sympathies) if you've read them all.

Sooz texts in

They're all at Marcia's parents and having a grand old time. Based on the messages I received, I think wine has been involved at some point during the evening.

Grant texts in

They're leaving the boat now after a good trip and are going to stop again at the massive Citti Markt to load up on cheap goodies for the larder in our London home.

All is well and they should be with Marcia's family again by early afternoon.

Whoops/Boat

We are on the boat now but the weather is pretty bad. We found the right boat and the whole thing was fairly easy, we even recognized the place where we got off the boat. There are no outlets in this room which is kind of annoying seeing as I have 24% battery left...

Sent from Grant's iPhone