Time Capsule of Sorts

We bought a new laptop shortly before we left Virginia in 2009. When we were in the middle of selling, donating, storing, and shipping everything we owned, I wasn’t sure what to do with my ancient (5-year-old) laptop—it was in working order but getting rusty, and it had loads of personal information on it. I put it in storage and forgot about it.

So it was with great surprise that I pulled a giant brick of a laptop out of a storage box in December. Turning it on was like opening a time capsule, finding evidence of our former, pre-London selves. I sorted through loads of Word files and Excel files that document the insane amount of time, energy, and organizational work I put into our move. No wonder I accomplished nothing else that spring.

My favorite discovery was a list of trips we planned to do. It started out pretty generic with a category for “shorter, weekend trips.” I was kind of impressed that we made it to all but one of these places (we never visited Alsace-Lorraine, though we got kind of close when we were in the Champagne region): Alsace-Lorraine, Athens, Barcelona, Brussels, Edinburgh, Madrid, Normandy, Paris, Prague, Provence, Vienna.

Note that that list was alphabetized. Beth v. 2009 was even more anal than Beth v. 2012. I’m really mellowing in my old age.

Next up, we have a list for “longer trips.” Commentary included below.

Egypt [Tom specifically wanted to climb a pyramid, but this one didn’t happen, first because of time and money, later because of political unrest.]

Ireland [I think our real trip turned out to be far more ambitious than we originally imagined. If I recall correctly, we assumed we'd just see Dublin and Dingle. Ha.]

Italy, Switzerland, Germany [I have no idea what this means—why did I write down three random countries, as if we could see all of them in a week? I suspect we had an inkling that we wanted to return to Italy and see some new places in Switzerland and Germany, but we had no idea where to begin. For the record, we had no recollection of this item when we planned Road Trip 2010, which is kind of weird.]

Mediterranean cruise [We scrapped any and all cruises pretty quickly when we saw what they did to port cities and how they aided and abetted irresponsible traveling.]

North Sea Cruise: Dover, Copenhagen, Berlin, Helsinki, Tallinn, St Petersburg, Amsterdam [We specifically skipped this cruise, because we realized we wanted to spend more quality time in some of these locations and in additional Scandinavian cities. We do regret, however, that we didn’t make it to Russia (as Americans in the UK, we would have had to give up our passports for too long to get the right visa).]

Okay, I need to stop talking about travel now before I accidentally book plane tickets to anywhere. I mean, it's not my fault if the Continental page just happened to pop up on my computer...