It begins.

[aadler]

Susan and I are spending the night in a hotel outside our local airport, waiting to fly out tomorrow.

How it’s been and how it’s to go:

We had to move quickly to set things up, because we’d lost so much time while waiting for the visas to arrive. Also, the weekend knocked out some of the things we could have been doing … but we got it all done, even though I feel like I’ve been running for days.

We made four bookings at three different hotels (and may have to do another at the end of things). Our RV and our car are in storage at a facility near where we were living, then I took an Uber to the airport hotel (I’d already dropped off Susan and our luggage).

We’ll spend a week in Ireland before continuing to China, and — because of my son’s work schedule and the fact that Mei-li is in the last weeks of her pregnancy — we’re spending the night of our arrival in a Hong Kong hotel, and the same for the night before we leave to fly back to the States.

Susan packed almost all of her suitcase (the big one) with gifts, then a lot of my suitcase with other gifts and with stuff she hadn’t been able to fit into her own bag. We all have our self-indulgences; her biggest one is the endorphin hit she gets from buying stuff for other people.

She’s seen our daughter in Ireland before; I’ve only passed through Ireland as airport stops while the Army was sending me out on leave/deployment or returning me from such. This will be my first ‘in-country’ visit with Roni and her husband, then.

I’ve obviously done more than that with my son and his family, but that’s mainly because it’s, yes, a family, to include a granddaughter and now another grandchild on the way. There are reasons for the inequity, then, but it’s still recognizably an inequity. Soon to be somewhat less of one.

Currently, tired (Susan even more so). Hopefully, we’ll manage to recover a bit as we proceed.