Debbi and I are back from a week in Boston – well, Massachusetts – visiting our families. I was there in July, but we decided that Debbi would come too, partly because she hadn’t seen her family in over 3 years.
Preparing for this trip was the most stressful part of it. While air fares have come down a bunch since the summer (I think we spent slightly more for both of us than I spent on just me in July), we also had to get to the airport (we decided to go with long-term parking at SFO, since 8 days is about the break-even point compared to taking a cab, Lyft, or Wingz), and also find a cat sitter.
This last part was the real point of angst: Our long-term sitter has basically retired to take care of her mother, and the woman who recommended her to use has been using Rover, which she says is okay but she’s not in love with it. We got a recommendation from one friend, and I picked up a recommendation from work. We also started learning that our regular sitter was a really great deal in the dollar department. The recommendation from work was promising, but not available during part of our trip, so she referred us to someone she knows, and we ended up going with her. Which worked out great! Thank goodness.
(Domino the dog, by the way, was already taken care of because our friends who fostered him were happy to take him for a week, so he could chase their husky around.)
We took a 10:45 am flight out, which meant we didn’t have to wake up at oh-god-thirty to drive up. Everything went smoothly, and we landed in Boston on time. The one hiccup is that it took 30 minutes for our bag to come out, but we got to my Dad’s house in time to grab a quick dinner at a taco place which is open late.
I had a couple more things to help my Dad with on this trip, and those all went smoothly. He was nice enough to let us use his car so we didn’t have to rent one (which was especially nice since rentals were starting at $100/day – guess that industry hasn’t entirely recovered from COVID yet).
We got to see the latest progress on the beach house remodel – a lot of work done in 3 months, and stuff more in the wheelhouse of our general contractor than the earlier structural work, so he was eager to show it off and know that we were happy with how things are going. And holy cow it’s all going to be awesome when it’s finished – hopefully early next spring, as winter is not far off up there. Also, he and Debbi got to meet, which I think was a big deal for both of them, as Debbi is the main person who talks with him.
We ate a bunch of good food on this trip, my favorites being return trips to Galley and Hops & Scotch, both excellent small-plates restaurants. One big difference is that we mostly ate inside, because it was too cold (and sometimes too wet) to eat outside. I was a little concerned about this, but not as much as when I was there in July. And from what I’ve read lately, COVID cases are quite low right now, and if you’re not prepared to eat inside now, it’s unlikely things are going to change for the better in the next 2 (or more) years. Granted, there are plenty of people who are likely prepared to not eat indoors (or even go out among other people much) for the foreseeable future (quite possibly the rest of their lives), but we decided that we’re not those people.
One night we went down to the North End to meet our oldest niece for dinner. Since we last saw her she’s graduate college and started working for Oracle, and is apparently kicking ass in her job. She seems very happy with life right now, which is great to see.
Over the weekend we made a couple of trips to visit the rest of Debbi’s family, spending one night down there. These trips are generally a hang-out-with-everyone experience for me, so there’s not a lot to report, except that I went walking around their neighborhood for about 40 minutes to look at Halloween decorations. Maybe not the smartest thing on a semi-rural road at night while wearing a black jacket, as sister-in-law mentioned, but oh well!
We made time to watch the final episode of Jodie Whittaker’s tenure on Doctor Who amidst all this. (It was okay.)
We had good weather on the trip – a little nippy a few nights with lows around 42°F, but a couple of days of highs near 70. And autumn in Massachusetts is quite pretty, with the fall colors in full display. There’s also something about Halloween displays outside the old east coast buildings at night that give them some extra punch. Plus I managed to avoid a repeat of the mishap of my last fall trip to MA!
Our flight home on Tuesday left around 5:30 pm, since for some reason JetBlue has either early morning or late afternoon flights from Boston to San Francisco. So it was a hecka late night for us, but we made it, and the cats were very happy to see us. We took Wednesday off and picked up the dog, who was also happy to see us. Maybe the first time he’s been left with our friends and had his owners come back for him, since he’d been surrendered three times. Now we’re trying to figure out if he’s enjoying the relative quiet of our home, or missing the constant wrestle opportunities at our friends’.
Our first COVID test today came back negative for both of us, so hopefully we’ve managed to dodge that particular bullet, and can look forward to going on a few more trips in the future.
