Home, Snowy Home

Our VERY snowy back deck

We’re home!

We got back to Tahoe yesterday after spending a few nights at my parents’ place. My sister is home for spring break from the U.K., where she is attending vet school. She is studying for her exams, and learning a few things that make me glad I will never be a vet. Like how to express a dog’s anal glands. Or how to pull a stillborn, rotting calf from a cow. Eewww.

Our flight home was uneventful, which is just fine after hearing about Southwest’s recent incident. Air New Zealand has the best in-flight entertainment we’ve experienced. Each passenger gets their own screen, with options to watch over 70 movies on-demand. This means that we don’t have to watch the same thing! We calculated that we’ve spent exactly one night apart over the last 14 months, which also means that we’ve watched the same movies. While compromise is necessary in marriage, our tastes in movies is not a perfect match. I will never share Mark’s appreciation for action flicks with monosyllabic dialogue, and he will never go out of his way to spend two hours with Helen Mirren or Queen Latifah. It is what it is. So Mark watched “TRON: Legacy” and I finally saw “Driving Miss Daisy”.

It’s good to be home. It’s April, it’s 60 degrees, and we have 5+ feet of snow in our backyard. We unpacked most of our stuff yesterday, then collapsed. We talked about the things we appreciate about being here. Like:

• It’s nice to have a bath tub again. We only stayed at three places in New Zealand where we had a bath tub.
• For that matter, it’s nice to have our own bathroom again. Most places we stayed had shared bathrooms – now we have three! Just for us! Yes, perhaps this is a bit excessive, but waiting 30 minutes for a shower in the morning is not the highlight of a trip either.
• When we picked up our mail from the post office, the postmaster had kept the mail from our overflowing post box in a separate tray in the back. He recognized us, so we didn’t even have to show ID to pick it up. Other people in the post office talked to us, and not just the crazy ones. There are benefits to living in a small town.
• When crossing the road, cars come from the right direction
• Kettle Chips, especially Buffalo Bleu!
• Uncrowded fitness centers to work off those Kettle Chips. We joined the Rec Center today and Mark enjoyed his first hour of weightlifting in nearly a year. We’re taking bets on whether he’ll be able to get out of bed tomorrow.

Most people might say “sleeping in your own bed”, but that’s not a highlight for us. We gave our bed away when we moved here and the bed in our furnished place is quite possibly the worst bed we’ve ever slept in. It offends in multiple ways, including broken springs that poke our knees and a sagging middle that threatens to swallow us whole within minutes of crawling in. I’m reading “Night Shift” by Stephen King, and the short stories of inanimate objects eating/maiming/killing people probably is not the best bedtime reading.

What are our plans? Our last trip (before Mark’s sabbatical ends in July) is a road trip through that strange and truly unique country – the U.S. We have seen many other countries (14 in as many months), and we think it’s about time we see more of our own. We plan to take a road trip for May and most of June. May will take us through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota. We haven’t figured out June yet, but neither of us have spent much time in the middle of the country (maybe with good reason?), but we hear there’s some great bourbon to be found somewhere around Kentucky (you listening Jeanmarie? ;^).

Snowy hills near our house

Most of April will be spent in Tahoe, with a brief trip to the Bay Area and another to the Central Valley for a friend’s wedding. And we expect it will take us awhile to work through our photos: editing, labeling, uploading… Stay tuned for more! In the meantime, here are some pics from our four-day tramp along the Abel Tasman coast.