We haven’t had nearly as eventful a time as our friends and family back in Florida, but we do have a few updates!
First, though, it seems prudent to state here that my parents are both fine, and their house is fine. A bit of superficial damage – a tree came down, they’re missing a screen panel on their lanai – but no big problems.
The weather here, though, has been great. We’ve been spending a lot of time outside, opening all the windows, it’s been fantastic. Not to rub it in or anything, hah.
We spent our last few days in our Airbnb just enjoying the area – we went on a few more long walks, slimmed down our luggage before packing (we found a secondhand store nearby we could give some of our clothes to), ate out a bit, ate in a bit, and generally just had a great time.
Packing was both more and less work than we were thinking; we had to pack using different bags than we’d hoped (our one backpack was just too small, we had to use the luggage), but then once we did, we were swimming in space, so that was nice.
The big challenge is that we’re trying to live out of only two of our six bags for the next three weeks, as we prepare for and then hang out with the McFarlands when they come to visit. We’ll be traveling around a lot with them, and we’d rather not do that lugging around all six of our bags. So we’re gonna use a luggage storage service that will hold our bigger bags for a couple weeks, and then deliver it to wherever we end up staying after the McFarlands leave – Hakodate, maybe.
But that means planning out what we’ll need for the next couple weeks and slimming down, which is actually surprisingly annoying when you’ve just slimmed your entire life down to six bags in order to travel in the first place. It wasn’t much more than normal travel questions – how much laundry do we assume we’ll be doing? Which shoes should we bring? – but made a bit more challenging by the limited options.
But ugh, we were still taking all of our stuff to our next hotel – traveling around the subway with six bags isn’t fun. The hotel is fine, nothing special – pretty small, pretty cheap – but at least it has wifi and a desk.
We’re going to check out a church nearby tomorrow (finally), so we’re excited about that. Expect some updates about that soon, along with a final decision about where we’ll be going after the McFarlands leave!