Travel For FOUR

We’ve been back from Tanzania for over a month and have barely posted…Goodness!

Good or bad though, there’s really not a lot to update…we’ve been going out with friends to our weekly wine course in the City, working away at the office, meeting up with friends for birthday parties and pub nights and generally ‘trying’ to settle back into life in London.

At work, I’ve been working with the Global clients in California of late. They’re lovely, but the 8 hour time difference and pressure of working with big brand high level corporate folks has made it a bit trying at times. I’m thankful for my local and regional clients. Now that three hour time difference to Moscow doesn’t seem nearly so trying 🙂

Otherwise, G’s been training for the London marathon (that’s right…he’s running in the marathon next April!). And I’ve been heading to the gym.

I guess the best thing to write about is the wine course. We are having so much fun! A group of 6 friends are taking it…we go for two hours every Wednesday night. And we can almost blind guess wines now! I’m better at guessing the whites than the reds, but that’s probably because we’ve focused more on that in the class. We’re learning about everything from the ‘legs’, to the colour, the nose…not to mention the taste. I can almost distinguish an apricot nose from a peach now! And I can certainly pick up minerality. [can you tell I’m proud?]. Now when we go out with the same group of friends for drinks outside of class, we take turns buying and make the others guess what it is….SO much fun!

Okay. I guess this qualifies as a proper update? On the travel front, we’ll be heading home for Christmas this year. We’ll arrive in Franklin to see K’s fam on the 23. Then drive on the 26th to DC to see G’s fam before flying back home on the 29th…if you’re around in the area, let us know.

So, tonight G and I decided we’d like apple pie. And it’s cold outside–so going out was not an option.

Putting one and two together, we decided to make our own apple pies. Though this may seem simple to start, for us in our London flat anything outside of reheating can be…well…interesting. You probably remember that we moved abroad in 6 suitcases, and they weren’t even mammoth size. So, we had to be selective about which of our cooking gear would come along.

So the prospect of making apple pie sans a pie dish, rolling pin, pastry mat, proper dough cutters and a ricer was a bit daunting. So, we had to be creative 🙂

Enter a wine bottle (ie the rolling pin), the weighing bowl (the circle cutter–albeit large), a glass cutting board (the pastry mat) and a fork (the ricer). The results taste good…though they are less beautiful than our usual standard. But no damage that a little ice cream can’t cover:)

Now, how to explain to G why dishwashing duty requires washing a bottle of Merlot…I’m teasing, of course he knows because he helped (he’s SO good).

So, for those curious on how our life has changed on two incomes this last year, rest assured that our simple life is still going strong. No TV. No Microwave. No Mixer (though G feels strongly that he should count :)). No Dishwasher. No Food Processor. No vacuum. Not to mention that our china, silver and platter selection was left behind. On the upside, we feel very fortunate to have a small washer/dryer that takes 4 hours per cycle and we did break down and buy a Blender.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. All the stuff we don’t have would probably cost a combined total of 300GBP. We could just buy it instead of posting about it–but the fact is we neither have the space nor the want for all that Stuff.

We kind of prefer things this way…with Stuff comes responsibility. Hopefully that doesn’t make us irresponsible, hmmm 🙂

That’s right…today marks our first snow of the season. This means that we’ll have had almost exactly 6 months between snow storms. I didn’t pick the best day to wear flats sans hose–my tootsies felt it, but the bright spot is that my gym has a sky light in the stretch room. I was able to watch the snowflakes collect on the roof while I did my leg lift routine.

Is it snowing where you are?

Tonight, I inadvertently Googled ‘Travelfortwo.net’. To my surprise, someone had referenced our blog recently and hence, their post popped to the top. Here’s what they had to say:

Crazy Jealous
Posted on October 13, 2008 by Ashley
Today, my friend K sent me a link to the blog of someone she knows. All I can say is, I hate them.

http://travelfortwo.net/

I want that life.

Hmmm….I suppose we should be flattered? We do enjoy our life. But, lately I’ve been a bit less enthusiastic about it than before. So, I thought it’s worth posting about so that you–our friends–are privileged with a more balanced view. We tend to talk about the rosy stuff because we don’t want friends and family back home to worry. But I don’t want folks to step away with an stacked view of the tradeoffs of the life we live.

London’s not new any more. It rains one out of two days. It’s always grey (even mid-summer). We’ve been here for 2 years now and we’ve done most things at least once and we’ve exhausted most of the easy weekend destinations. Our thirst for travel has started to subside. And, hence, we realize now that we actually spend time in London that we need more friends 🙂 For the first two years here, we focused on making the most of our time–traveling all about and never sitting still because our initial plan was to leave after 12-24 months. Then, we regrouped and decided not to head home just yet and to adopt a more long-term focus.

But, recently my dad had a major accident on the farm. He walked away with a broken jaw and a bruised ego. He was very lucky. But then, a couple weeks ago (on the heels of my dad’s accident) my uncle died. There are friends and family back in the States that we haven’t seen in YEARS–we keep in touch through email, googlechat, blogs and postcards–somehow your margarita tailgates for VT games seem way more fun. Picking up and living so far away comes with tradeoffs. And it’s not always as glamourous and fun as it may seem.

So, I guess the purpose of my post is the balance the scales a bit. The grass on your side of the fence also looks quite green from where we sit. Hmmm…if only we could be fit without exercise, magically find a 3 bedroom house in Belsize on sale for £1, adopt your cutie tykes and forgo the need for drawn out pregnancies, have the cutest puppy on earth, have our stock portfolio returned to pre-recession levels AND keep the pleasantries of our current life constant…now that would be something worth envying 🙂

This said, we like our life. We’ll keep it. And hope this post finds you happy with the balance you strike in your life as well.