What a great family experience!

I concur with the Grampies that sometimes you just know when it’s time to cut short a trip and come home. The decision to leave early from Thailand last January was so clearly the right one that I mostly just feel incredible gratitude that I actually listened to my gut for once. We have been enjoying your trip by proxy and are sad that these circumstances have intervened but we look forward to seeing you somewhere socially distanced in Portland again. Your steed awaits, the one with four wheels.

It’s just not working, Tricia. Try as I might I can’t summon up all that much sympathy for poor you, stuck down there in your ‘utopian jail’, a brilliant national leader, a sane society and 40 million sheep. So tough!

Yes, that could definitely work. We’ll have t nudge Jeff to add a calendaring function.

I have thought about your decision to come home from that tour many times, and wondered when we’d be in the same situation. Mostly I wonder about my aging parents, and it’s a shock to have it be because of Shawn and my own health instead. It’s just as well that we have multiple reasons to head home, because it made the decision so clear and easy to come to.

And you’re right, of course. Greece and Italy aren’t going anywhere soon, and with any luck we’ll be back before long. Thanks for following along!

Thanks, Bob. We’re sorry to be heading home too, especially since it’s so brilliant here now. No regrets though. It’s the obvious right thing to do, and we know how fortunate we were to have had the experience we did. As it is, the past 10 weeks are still one of the longer tours of our lives, and one of the best.

I'm so sorry to hear that your winter travel plans aren't working out, but it sounds like the travel gods are telling you 'Go home!'. I would definitely make the same decision you have. Travel safe.

Steve and I were talking about your forthcoming plans this evening. We both felt that if it were us we would be coming home sooner rather than later. In fact we did just that a year and a half ago when our daughter needed urgent health care - either surgery or radiation. She is now living with us and we are managing illness and a time of Covid but at least we are together. So sorry that your wonderful trip is coming to a sudden end but there will be light at the end of the tunnel and Europe, Greece and cycling will be there on the other side-for you and for us too. Take care. Safe travels "home."

It doesnt seem that it was just over a year ago that we were cycling up the Po with nothing to worry us but the heat. Now that drated virus is chasing you along the river, just hope that you come up with a good plan. Now we are in a rather utopian jail. We cant enter or leave the country without a mandentary 14 days in managed isolation, and there are actually very few planes either entering or leaving. Summer has come and the weather beautiful and we have the freedom to roam with apart from using the Covid tracer ap few or no restrictions We have taken advantage of this and visited places we havent been to for years and even had a very short 5 day bike tour
Our elections are over and the results as expected with Jacinda getting a mandate to continue for another year. However what, like all the world, we worry about is what happens on November 3rd
Keep safe, I am sure you will come up with a great plan and pedal away the virus

Maybe a cycleblaze timeshare!

Huh. Edible! I thought it might be an amanita. Looks like you could use it as a dinner plate after all.

Looks like a parasol all right.

Sorry to see that the corona situation is getting more serious in Italy again - as everywhere else, for that matter. Germany is doing ok, but only relatively speaking. The number of new infections is rising rapidly.

Wow! What an experience to be in that restaurant on their last night of normal* service for a while. Makes me wonder what kind of government support restaurant workers in different countries receive.

*Normal?! What's that??

Never!

Having worked at a place in Beaverton that had a healthy nutria population, I've missed seeing them.

And when they're in the water they look so beaver-like.