January 1, 2023
Look both ways!
Looking back
Somewhere in the back of our storage unit is a box with about fifteen wall calendars, souvenirs from our working years. They were all galleries of photos that we selected and took to a print shop to remind us of highlights of the previous year. We’d make three copies - one for my cubicle, one for Rachael’s, and one for home. Rachael’s copy was generally different from the other two, since she made her own selections with it.
It was an annual tradition that I especially enjoyed, and when we went vagabond we decided to continue with it and publish digital calendars here each year as a thumbnail sketch of the previous year. Here are the previous digital calendars, for display in 2020, 2021, 2022; and here is our calendar for 2023, to tack up on our virtual wall in the months ahead. Feel free to print it out or copy it for your own virtual wall. Think of it as a zero-cost NFT. You can thank me for not using a photo of me photoshopped onto Lance’s body for the cover shot.
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Looking ahead
So we close one chapter, and open up another. What’s the vision for the coming year? Is anything planned, or is Team Anderson going to just wing it this year and go where the winds take them?
Well, there are certainly ideas on the table, some fairly well set but much of it little more than speculation at this point. We’re putting them down here in case anyone’s curious, but mostly so that we can look back in the future and laugh or cry over what we were thinking of that didn’t come to pass after all. Take this all with a few grains of salt though - our predictions are getting less reliable all the time as we introduce more flexibility and a slower pace into our lives. It’s pretty funny now to look back on how many major changes were made to last year’s 9 month tour, and that’s likely to be the case in 2023 as well.
Still, it’s easier for me at least to have a plan or vision and make changes to it than to just stare at a blank page; so here’s what we’re thinking as the year turns over:
Winter
This one’s easy and pretty well set. A month in Tucson (yay!), followed by two weeks driving up to Portland, followed by a month on the fifteenth floor of a downtown condo, likely staring at the rain, doing the taxes, downsizing the footprint in our storage unit, visiting friends and family. The big unknown - a pretty small one really - is how to spend those two weeks driving back to Portland. We’ll figure it out later in the month when we assess the weather, but we have some candidates in mind: Boulder City, Solvang, maybe the Napa Valley, maybe a longer stay in Half Moon Bay. We’ll see.
Spring
Another season that’s pretty well defined: we’re going to Italy again! We bought our tickets months ago: on March 15th we leave for Palermo, and fly home from Bologna on June 13th when our time in the Schengen Zone runs out. We’re not biking the whole way though. It’s planned as a three part journey connected by shortish train rides. Each of the parts is roughly a month long:
- Starting in Sicily, we’ll bike from Palermo to Messina and then ferry across strait to Scilla, in Calabria. This section is well defined, with nearly all of the lodging identified and booked. Not that a few bookings here won’t get cancelled along the way due to unforeseen events.
- After taking the train from Scilla to Cosenza we’ll bike across Basilicata and Puglia, ending on the Adriatic coast in Termoli. We have a detailed plan with proposed daily stages, but it’s really dreamware at this point. Nothing is booked, and there’s plenty of slop in the schedule for us to rethink the plan along the way.
- From Termoli we plan to take the train up the coast to Pesaro, a town we fell in love with two years ago and are excited to see again. From there we’ll carve a horseshoe out of northeast Italy, turning back south at Trento and ending in Rovigo where we’ll catch a train to Bologna. With any luck, our suitcases will be there when we arrive this time.
Something like this:
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Summer
We’re coming back to America for the summer, but with only the vague outline of a plan in mind. We’ll touch base in Portland for maybe two weeks - just long enough to pick up the Raven and run the usual script of errands and social engagements - and then set off on another road trip. We’re thinking we’ll drive east to Minneapolis to check in with our son Shawn and his family and then return west through Canada. We envision a leisurely trip with many multi-night stays, much biking and hiking, and hopefully a chance to see any of you who are at home this summer and would like a face-to-face chat. If you see us coming your way next summer, please speak up.
After that we’ll return to Portland to hang out and prepare for:
Autumn
We’ve been talking about ending the year in sunny southern Spain ever since we left Valencia three years ago, before Covid. the earliest we can return to the Schengen Zone is September 13th, but we could start later than that depending on what itinerary we settle on. We (I, primarily) have run through many variations of what to do with three months in Spain this time, but the one constant was that it would end in the south and include Valencia, Mallorca and Almeria.
Our current thinking is to begin in Bilbao and drop south through the middle of the country through intriguing places like Olite, Calatayud and Teruel, reaching the Mediterranean coast at Valencia. From there we’ll catch the ferry to Palma for a couple of weeks on Mallorca and possibly Menorca, return to Valencia, and then bike west across Murcia and Almeria to Malaga.
This one is really up in the air at this point though, and little more than dreamware. We could erase this and go back to one of the other alternatives that’s been considered - through Extramadura and southern Portugal again and ending in Valencia, or east down the Pyrenees and then west to Valencia. There’s plenty of time to erase, draw up a new plan, and erase again; and once we’ve boxed ourselves in and purchased a flight I’m sure that there will still be plenty of changes, even once we’re on the road. For the record though, here’s our New Year’s prediction:
And Beyond
With luck we’ll still be up and running in 2024 too, so there’s been idle speculation about what to do when we leave southern Spain late next year. The usual subjects crop up: another winter in Tucson is always a possibility, but I’ve started gently lobbying for something different this time: maybe Taiwan, maybe Victoria and Tasmania - both places we’d love to reexperience. There’s no rush though, and we have at least a half year to mull it over before constraining ourselves when we buy our ticket to Spain. Do we fly back to Portland, to Taipei or Melbourne or somewhere else, or just get a one-way ticket and punt the decision further down the field?
One idea definitely keeps nagging at us though - the possibility of getting a long stay visa in France for 2024 and planning on an entire year in Europe. We were quite tempted by this last year, and we’re more tempted now. If I were placing bets I’d say it’s more likely than not that we’ll go for it this time. We could spend another wonderful spring in France and then head north - maybe up through Germany to the North Sea, tour a bit of southern Sweden and Denmark, and return south through the lowlands to northern France again. Another run south could find us back in Nice and considering whether to spend the early winter in Puglia and Greece. As long as we’re daydreaming, why not think big?
So if we did do that, it would color what to do after leaving Spain this winter. Sometime over the winter we’d have to assemble our documentation and make it down to San Francisco for a trip to the French consulate there to submit our application - which might work well as a winter stopover on the way to Hawaii.
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Exciting plans, as always. I hardly have the courage to plan for next summer. Spring is in the bag, though.
1 year ago
We’re both excited about the coming year too. The one after is too far out to do more than speculate about of course. At this point in life every year that we pull off like this feels like such an extraordinary gift.
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And I'm so very honored to have made your calendar. Thank you! That was a big surprise. Maybe I will buy you that coffee in February after all.
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https://photos.app.goo.gl/z2rVASWqjy9jNimw7
1 year ago