It’s Easter Sunday in Almeria.  Rain is on tap for the whole day, and after getting our fill of biking, hiking and Semana Santa procession viewing over the past six days we’re pretty content to just hang out in our apartment watching umbrellas go by outside and wait for lunch to roll around.  It’s a good time to open a favorite book from the past, one that’s never been published - partly because I didn’t keep a journal at the time, but mostly because I somehow failed to preserve the photos from this tour when we downsized and sold our home seven years ago.

Losing those photos has really saddened me ever since.  I’ve looked back through storage several times, not quite believing they could really be gone.  Some of them - Rachael lying on the beach on the Bay of Fires in Tasmania, a gang-gang cockatoo in the Grampians, the photo of our bikes stored in the bathtub of our apartment in St. Kilda - still come readily to mind, but I know I’ve lost many others and the memories they would trigger if I could see them again.

One feature of Google Photos that Rachael really likes but I find annoying for no good reason is that it will periodically send you a ‘memory’ email with a few photos from the past.  One came in a week or two ago, and for some reason I followed it and was stunned to see a gallery of our photos from Australia.  They still exist, stashed away up there in the cloud somehow.  My theory is that I must have photocopied the prints off to my iPad before scrapping the album, and then deleted them from the iPad for some reason.  They must have been backed up to the cloud in the meantime, where they’ve been waiting for me to rediscover them for the last seven years.

Thanks, Cloud!  What a gift to find them again!  I quickly downloaded all of them to the iPad before they disappear or I can’t find them again, with the ide that I’ll put up a journal with them and whatever memories Rachael and I can conjure up around them.  So here we are - here’s that rainy day I’ve been waiting for, a good time to get started.

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And, I see that it was wise to immediately download all those photos, because when I looked for the photo of that gang-gang cockatoo it was missing.  Maybe I didn’t download it, or maybe it wasn’t scanned and backed up.  But when I went back to look the photos in the cloud, I can’t find any of them now.   it was just some random blessing that opened the curtain to them briefly reveal them briefly somehow nd then closed again.

Since I can’t find my own photo though, I’ll steal one from eBird.  It’s one of my favorite bird memories, and the only time I’ve seen this bird.  And it was only a fleeting look, one I was lucky to get on camera.  He was on the trunk of a eucalyptus tree in the Grampian mountains, sidled around to where he was briefly visible to me, and then retreated to the backside again.  

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We still can’t believe that we talked our employer into this idea we came up with 18 years ago.  Remote work was still a vanguard idea then, and was nothing that our IT shop had experimented with at all yet as I remember.  Somehow though we talked them into the idea of letting us work remotely from Melbourne for nearly seven weeks, intermixing remote work with breaks for short bicycle tours.  The idea appealed to the technical services manager as an opportunity to use us as guinea pigs to experiment with new technology, and our two supervisors bought in to letting us be physically absent from the next forty days and manage our respective software teams from a distance.

And so we set off, more heavily burdened than normal for a bike tour.  We had our bikes of course, as well as panniers and all we’d need for the several multi-day excursions we planned to take.  But we also carried a pair of top of the line laptops the office lent us as well as the other peripherals we’d need to communicate with our coworkers.  

So join with us as we reminisce on this unique time in our lives.  It will certainly be fun for us, digging up memories we haven’t thought of or talked about together in ages.  And just now, when I asked Rachael whether we each had a laptop or shared one, she reminded me of something I’d forgotten about.  Part of the way we made the sale on this idea was that it was to celebrate my sixtieth birthday.  We told them we wanted to go to Australia, but if we could find a way to telecommute from there it would make it possible to stay longer without being out of contact from our teams the whole time.

What a con job!