Done Trippin’
For some reason that I can’t completely explain other than to say that I can’t avoid taking responsibility for my own cumulative decisions, we are suddenly immersed in more trip planning than normal. We literally have things on the docket now for each of the next six months. This month is relatively easy because we are just going back to New York to spend time with the kids, the pretense being granddaughter Evelyn’s choir concert. The complicating factor for me is that instead of flying back with Kim, I have to detour to Des Moines, Iowa for three days of testimony on a case involving the shorting of Tesla stock for which I am acting as an expert witness. I have a great deal of passion about the protection of unwary investors, even and perhaps especially ones who go too far out on the risk plank. I am also very experienced in all the aspects of shorting stocks, so I get somewhat passionate about it all, perhaps because I know too much about it and I find it a very treacherous arena. This case began for me almost two years ago, so this will be the culmination of a fairly long process. And who wouldn’t want to spend three days in Des Moines, right?
June is a little more complicated. Based on our withdrawal from the Morocco motorcycle trip in October and the subsequent cancellation of the trip, our group of riders got together and decided that they wanted to organize a ride in Arizona and New Mexico. Summer might not seem the ideal time for those environs, but actually, we will be in the mountains, so hopefully we won’t be sizzling. The unusual part of this trip is that I have organized most of these motorcycle trips with this group for 28 years and yet this year I am not lifting a finger in the planning. I also get a kick out of the fact that I just sold my motorcycle trailer because I didn’t think I would be using it anymore and now I will be riding in the heat of late June across the desert to Phoenix with Kim following in the car. That was the exact situation I owned the trailer to avoid. Go figure.
We will get back from that ride with just a few days to spare before my daughter and her family (with my two granddaughters) arrive to spend a month with us. This was the Ithaca replacement plan when we gave up the Ithaca house where my daughter’s family has spent the month of July for several years. Now we are hoping they enjoy it our here enough to want to spend Julys with us. Kim and my daughter Carolyn have been canoodling the schedule for months now. There are trips planned to Universal Studios, Disneyland, the San Diego Zoo and Legoland…and that’s just the day trips. The main event is a ten-day Utah and Grand Canyon extravaganza that will, at it’s core, be a dual family reunion for both Kim and my families. We will overnight in Las Vegas at Sam’s Town Casino to visit my sister Barbara and to give the girls a small taste of the Ching-Ching-Ching of Vegas (without exposing them to the full Vegas Strip program). We will then drive up through Valley of the Fire and the Virgin Valley Gorge to Zion National Park and then on to our favorite spot in the West. That would be the Lodge at Red River Ranch, a family-run lodge we have frequented for 20+ years. I have rented the whole shebang out for five days of family fun. Kim, with an assist from me, has been organizing daily events for the five days.
We will go to the Escalante Staircase and Bryce Canyon. We will do a Llama Trek and a UTV tour of Capital Reefs National Park. We will go up to Fishlake to see Pando, the largest and oldest living organism in the world. It is a 141 acre stand of interconnected (at the roots) aspen grove that was born from a seed 20,000 years ago (give or take) at the end of the last ice age. There will be fly fishing and Bison watching going on in addition to all the hiking and foot stomping. Knowing Kim, she will arrange for western singers to serenade us and local storytellers to regale us with tall tales of the range. Both Kim and I have spent many a fine vacation in that part of Utah and we want to share it with our family and several close friends. Make no mistake, any clan gathering that involves 45 people (12 of whom are children) ranging in age from 1 to 87 coming in from San Francisco, Pasadena, New York, Ithaca, Wabash, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Camarillo, Delaware, and all around San Diego, is bound to turn into a bit of shit-show at some point over something. We have two people on walkers, several with ADHD and other childhood issues, siblings that sometimes get along and sometimes not, at least nine sets of parents and children covering perhaps 3+ generational cohorts, and every variation of creaky joints you can imagine. The rooming assignments alone are a logistical nightmare that dredge up every hurt feeling of a lifetime. I can only imagine how everyone is likely to react to the menu that Kim arranges. Any guess how many people will go missing for one event or meal or another is anyone’s guess.
Once we and the poor bison family in the front corral make it through the five days, a subset of us head off to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to enjoy the rustic charm of the less-travelled part of Arizona. I am already preparing myself for the time zone confusion of being in a National Park, which uses Daylight Savings inside of a state that does not use Daylight Savings in a part of the country where all the surrounding states do use Daylight Savings. That should make for a less than crisp schedule while we are there. We then return to San Diego via Kingman, Arizona where we will go through Oatman, one of the best ghost towns in the West, where burros roam the streets. That should give the granddaughters a good taste of the Wild West.
Then we get a break for a few weeks before we head back East at the end of August and into September for son Thomas’ wedding in the Hudson Valley. I’ve already done my part by buying a new tan suit to match the color palette of the wedding party (I swore off of suits a few years ago and have been slowly shedding my wardrobe of them, but, not so fast Abernathy). We are only doing a little bit of the organizing for this affair since as father and step-mother of the groom, there is only so much which is being delegated to us. But that doesn’t stop the invited guests form asking us about this and that as though we are the wedding planners.
Now, literally as of today, we have added back an October European trip and guess who is doing the planning…yep, that would be me. We have three sets of friends who want to be with us for some time in Europe in October, so we will be flying into Paris from San Diego, spending a few days there with friends Ann & Chris, then Chunneling to London to meet up with Gary & Oswaldo to train it up to Edinburgh, where we will meet up with Frank and Loretta. We will then all go over to Loch Lomand to see what Scotland looks like in October. From there we will train down to Liverpool, where none of us has ever been and for some reason feel we should experience. Then its down into Wales for a few days of Celtic charm and a visit with my friend Michael’s Mum, Kitty Walsh of Wales. From there we will head back to London so we can Chunnel back to fly out of Charles de Gaulle to come back to San Diego.
Thank God for Mike, Mike, Mike, who has taken on all the planning for the February trip to Southeast Asia hitting Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. We went over the spreadsheet today and agreed that Mike, Mike, Mike has this planning under total control. We will be doing that trip with Mike & Melisa and Faraj & Yasuko, so I think I now have to admit that we are not yet as done with global travel as I thought we might be. We still be trippin’.