I sit here writing this in the home of my wonderful mother-in-law (yes, I can always use more points for excellent sucking up) where we are once again leaving the Saab. The next leg of our adventure awaits.

You probably know the plan: Copenhagen to Berlin to Valencia to Paris to Valencia to Kenya to Valencia and maybe a few side trips. We are really hoping for some visits from friends (Hello, Teresa and Steff, Terryl and Rob, MJ and Kev, Susanna and Mike, Kenta and Doug, Tamar, anyone???). We already have Thanksgiving booked with Abi and whoever else wants to show up and Pesach with Esther (and Abi) and whoever else wants to show up.

Friday at 11:30, we closed the door at our place in DC for the last time. I’m stealing Steven’s thunder here, but here are the directions:

• Go to the end of the street
• Turn left
• Drive 1,023 miles
• Get off I-95
• Drive 3.2 miles, making two turns
• Arrive.

We didn’t drive the whole way Friday. We’ve decided we’re old and tired enough without a 15-hour drive and a 2:30 a.m. arrival time. (Steven worked in the morning.) Instead, we stopped in Pooler, Ga., a suburb of Savannah which obviously has grown up around being a convenience exit off I-95 for snowbirds and others. We decided on Indian food and had a surprisingly good meal. If you happen to head that way, we recommend NaaN Apetit (get it?).

Sunday, Esther and I went to the Wakodahatchee Wetlands in Boca Raton, which has a nice wooden walkway around a (you guessed it) wetlands teeming with birds, iguanas, and the requisite gators. You can watch a few webcams if you’re a birder. The site was built on a former wastewater utility plant. They now pump (highly treated, it says) wastewater into the wetlands and the wetlands does the rest, offering back clean water.

While walked the boardwalk, Steven discovered that in Florida, one doesn’t need a prescription for a typhoid shot (as he was getting another Hep A/B shot), so that will be our fun activity for today. If you’re keeping count, we are left short only of a yellow fever vaccine for the Kenya trip after that (well…also a polio booster is recommended, but they seem difficult to find).

Our leaving routine

By the time we hit the road at the end of a stay, we are more than ready. We usually spend the last few weeks checking things off the list. We stop buying anything but the bare necessities at the supermarket, decide whether there are hot spots we missed or want to return to, and shift our thinking to what we will pack for our new adventure. This leg was all about family so we spent a lot of the weekend with family, our whole reason for being in DC anyway.

Visiting Florida is our transition period and a chance for a few days rent-free 🙂

We have a routine for vacating spaces, although we always think we are more organized than we are. This time we prepacked since we have a lower weight limit on our flight from Berlin to Valencia and wanted to make sure we wouldn’t go over. We were leaving on Friday, so had to dump everything we didn’t want in the storage locker the weekend before. We managed the weight with ease. One less worry. Of course, we forgot about several items, but it’s all good. We will make it work.

Right before we leave, we empty the fridge and pantry (ouch! I hate throwing out food so we try to cut it as close as possible) strip the beds, take out the garbage and do a couple of sweeps through the house to make sure we aren’t leaving anything. Of course, we always do. Right now my Brazilian soccer shirt is MIA. I suspect it got mixed up in the sheets and towels. Guess we’ll have to go back to Porto Alegre to get another. Vitor, get the meat ready for Steven.