I was curating my On This Day section this morning and found this 15 year old reference to @bjhess! One of my favorite things about blogging is the long history that you can create. Thanks for the Brightkite invite Barry! 🤣
We had a fun night doing a Murder Mystery Dinner and I decided to really embrace my character. “Little Fitz is a vaudevillian star of the Music Halls of Europe, where his ventriloquist act with Ziggy has proven very popular.”
Ziggy and I may have future appearances. 🤣
It was great to see Steve Earle tonight at the Dakota on his “Alone Again” tour. Just him and his guitars sharing a wide array of songs from his catalog.
It was awesome to hear Zandi Holup open up for Steve Earle tonight. She played a good set of original songs but unfortunately none of them are published yet.
Mazie posted her first blog post about her photo walk in Soglio, Switzerland. She has her own micro.blog site for easy publishing. 🎉
She is a fabulous writer so I’m hoping she will share her talents with the world.
POAP 6747546 at BPEL DECOMP.
Allergies hit me hard today. Medicine didn’t seem to do much. Feels like something different than typical ragweed. Tammy also got it bad and she usually doesn’t have allergies that bad. 😬
Update: Allergies drove me to buy an air purifier from Amazon for delivery tomorrow. Haven’t tried air purifiers before but many say they work wonders.
We decided to return to Switzerland tonight by watching the 2015 release of Heidi. I hadn’t seen the movie and wasn’t familiar with the story and thought it was fun to watch, and I loved the role the Alps played in it.
It dawned on me that my Blockclock has upgradeable firmware and today I jumped from 1.07 to 1.22!
I was also having intermittent WiFi issues and realized that the Blockclock binds to a specific WiFi access point by MAC address, so I added multiple ones for more reliability.
We all went to Barbie tonight and it blew right past my already high expectations. It was a fun movie while still covering important topics. Plus, the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequence in the beginning was just delightful! Highly recommended. 🍿
While we were in Soglio, Switzerland at the end of our hiking trip we all got our cameras out and did a photo walk of the village. Here are my ten highlights. Also see Mazie’s photos and Tyler’s photos.
POAP 6739826 at TechJam 2023 Attendee.
Switzerland & Italy Log - Day 17
Weather: Warm morning in Florence. Airports fine.
- Pack up suitcases for journey home
- Breakfast at hotel
- Taxi to Florence Airport
- Tyler forgets Pokémon gifts in airport at another gate and runs back and is able to recover them right before we board. 😳
- KLM 1642 City Hopper flight to Amsterdam
- Flight delayed over 40 mins due to baggage loading issues. Anxious with an already short transfer to next flight.
- Another Amazing Race experience as we dashed from the Cityhopper late arrival to gate D47 with only 25 minutes to departure. Cleared passport control on super-fast-cut-in-front-of-everyone and were the last four welcomed onto the plane by the KLM gate agent waving us along! 🏃🏼♀️🏃🏼♂️🏃🏼♀️🏃🏼♂️
- Delta 165 to Minneapolis landed at 5p CT
- Lyft ride home
- Home Sweet Home!
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Breathe it all in
On the final evening of our Switzerland & Italy trip we slowly walked around the Duomo in Florence and took in the grandeur. We all admired it and Mazie and I “breathed it all in”. It’s a goofy thing we like to do to really take in the scene with a big, deep breath. It started by breathing in the waterfalls in Iceland.
As we were standing there it hit me that this is the last family vacation we’ll take before she goes off to college.
Many new journeys are ahead. But I’d be fine keeping things just as they are too.
Boarding the KLM Cityhopper in Florence to begin our journey back to Minneapolis via Amsterdam! 🛫
I’m more than twice as active when we travel versus “normal”. 🚶🏼♂️
Switzerland & Italy Log - Day 16
Weather: Hot and sunny.
- Breakfast at hotel
- Walk to cooking class pickup
- Ride to Accidental Tourist villa
- Pasta cooking class in Tuscan Countryside with Accidental Tourist
- Ride back to pickup location
- walk to hotel
- Cool down, freshen up
- Taxi to Chalet Fontana to get olive oil and honey, but they don’t sell their honey ☹️🍯
- Walk back to hotel with “The Struggle”
- Cool down and freshen up
- get gelato at Venchi
- Help Angie get pool open over FaceTime
- Walk around and shopping
- Tammy and Mazie purchased matching linen shirts
- Dinner at New Bridge pizza with Moscato d’Asti
- Stroll around Duomo and take in last scenes of Florence at night
- Return to hotel
- 😴
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Restful.
Trees embracing.
