It hadn’t occurred to me to blog this trip until a couple of folks (one of them being Dan) asked somewhat expectantly if I was going to. When I paused, both responded with “you should.” And I remembered that, although it hadn’t occurred to me to blog when we traveled Memorial Day weekend, I regretted not doing it even as we were doing it. (We loved Richmond, VA, and blogging  would have helped me remember exactly why. As I’ve said many times, in the end I do this for me because, among other reasons, knowing I’m going to blog changes the way I go through the day and hugely influences what I pay attention to, and how I pay attention to it.)

So here we are. Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. Huh? How did we come up with that? While we would have traveled for Thanksgiving anyway, I’ll use this as an opportunity to update whoever is reading on what’s going on with us.

We started 2016 with Dan moving to Raleigh and the plan being I would join him sometime in 2017. That plan is now on hold because of a little deal Bayer is in the middle of with Monsanto. Without going into too much detail, if that deal goes through how long Dan will stay in Raleigh becomes questionable. While there are several possible outcomes for him, one is he gets moved to St. Louis. A couple of months ago I said to Dan “I’m struggling to get my head around changing jobs and moving to Raleigh in 2017, to have to do it again in 2018.” To which he responded “I know.” Good! Glad that’s not my imagination. A week later he upgraded that to “we probably shouldn’t make any decisions about you until maybe the summer [of 2017].” So all of that is just on hold until further notice. And then we immediately launched into a discussion about “where else in the country can we meet?”

Which brings us to Philadelphia. Which, as I said, we were going to do even before above discussion. Dan went to school there (University of Pennsylvania) and hasn’t been back since he graduated, circa 1992. I have never been and am looking forward to seeing a part of the country I haven’t before. And of course lots of history there which we love. Staying true to our efforts to maximize the smaller number of days off I get compared to him, I’m not taking any additional time this week. So I leave 7:30pm Wednesday and arrive 7am Thanksgiving morning. Dan will get there from Raleigh about 8:30am, and we’ll get on with our day. It will be a quick trip: 2 days in Philadelphia, and a day trip to Harrisburg with a stop in Lancaster on the way back on Saturday. Then we both go home on Sunday.

Other possibilities for future domestic travel as we extend are separation:
Charleston, SC (which was the #2 option for this trip and I don’t want us to forget that!)
DC
Denver
Phoenix
Minneapolis
Savannah, GA

I’m sure we’ll come up with others. Who knows where we will end up….