How long do we get to stay here? Whatever it is, I don’t think it will be long enough. So far, we love everything: the people are friendly, the architecture is amazing, the food is great (it’s NOT all goulash), the prices are low, and the weather is fine. I know it’s only been one day, but I thought we would have to make a lot of adjustments, and so far it’s been easy. I thought we would have a hard time getting by only on English: we’d been told that 80% of the people speak nothing but Magyar, and if you wanted to speak English, you’d better find somebody under 25 years old, or else you’d be out of luck. It turns out that in the heart of Budapest, we’ve had no problem at all. Pretty much every restaurant has English somewhere on the menu, or there are pictures you can point to, or we’ve been able to find a waiter who understands enough English that we could get our point across.We’re even learning a little Magyar, wonder of wonders.

One of the things we’ve noticed is that there is art everywhere. There are the typical statues of generals, saints and war heroes as you might expect; there are memorials of various wars; there’s a huge statue on the hill overlooking the city, which was put up by the Soviets to remind the Hungarians of who released them from the Nazis (it has since been repurposed to honor all those who sacrificed their lives for Hungarian liberty).

To Maggie and me, the most powerful memorial was the smallest: a collection of shoes, cast in iron, representing the Hungarian Jews who were executed by the Hungarian Nazi party, the Arrow Cross. The people to be executed were taken to the banks of the Danube and told to remove their shoes. Then they were shot so that their bodies fell into the river. The message being that, to the Nazis, their shoes were more valuable than their lives. You can find more on sculpture and the story behind it here. Thousands of people were murdered in this way, out of the approximately 600,000 Hungarian Jews who were killed, most of them sent to the death camps.

It’s a living memorial: people have added flowers, votive candles and thousands of pebbles to mark their witness to the memorial. While we were there, a dozen people came by to observe, leave a remembrance or to sit on the bank and be present. That’s a part of what we love about this place, too: its long, often sad history isn’t ignored; there is actually an active effort to keep it alive, so the tragic episodes aren’t repeated.

No trip to any city is complete without me (Maggie) making a trip to the local food market.  First thing we did in Budapest was go to the Central Market in Budapest. It is a restored neogothic hall for traders with grocery produce on the ground floor & souvenirs on the upper floor.  This will be my go-to-place for fresh veggies and meats – not unlike the Austin Central Market or Whole foods only better!

 

 

 

 

Flight to Budapest was uneventful except for the last leg when our luggage didn’t make it to Budapest along with us.  Not a problem.  The owner of our rental unit had prearranged a car to pick us up, and the driver didn’t complain about any BO or anything so I guess we are OK to walk around until our luggage arrives.

The owner of our apartment rental here met us at here at the apt.  He is Italian and his English excellent.  He spent a lot of time explaining how everything works and giving us tourist helpful tourist information.  The apartment is on a side street in the Heart of Budapest.  It is EXTREMELY quiet location close to a busy street, market, and restaurants.  We had planned to stay here for a month, and wonder now if that is enough.  🙂

Getting ready to head out here in a few minutes to hit the Tourist Bureau here and pick up a month’s pass on the Metro/Bus system.  Clay has volunteered to post the first day’s activities tonight.

The trip from Apalachicola to Melbourne was on on of those “picture perfect” days. We decided to forego I-10 and hit the back roads to Melbourne. it was an easy drive and took only 7 hours. Highly recommended route.

So glad that we got off the back roads in Orlando and headed east on 528 towards the Kennedy Space Center. We had forgotten that Friday was the launch of the SpaceX rocket, and happened to see it launch from our front row seats in our car. I (Maggie) was too busy watching to photograph the beginning stages, but managed to snag one photo of the smoke trail.

We’re off! We didn’t make it too far on the first leg: just to Apalachicola, FL for a few days of R&R, which in our case stands for Rambling and Restaurants. We came to the right place. Miles of untouched beaches to walk on, and a new place to eat on every corner. So far one of our favorite places is the Up the Creek Raw Bar, in the building with the two gables. We actually have to get up from our rocking chairs to go eat, but we don’t have to exert too much more effort than that.

If you’re looking for a relaxed place to stay with the family, Apalachicola is it. It’s on the Gulf coast of Florida, about halfway down the panhandle, far from cities, neon lights, amusement parks, crowds, noise – in short, it’s not about to become the next Spring Break destination. The main activity here is catching, cooking and eating various sea creatures. The next most popular activity is sitting around talking about catching, cooking and eating; if you do that while drinking coffee or a beer, so much the better.

Not everybody sees it that way. At our favorite breakfast place, Café con Leche, the waitress was from Venezuela; she said that she used to love Apalachicola twenty years ago, when it was “like a third world country, except everything worked.” Now, she said, it was getting too crowded, too many new buildings, too much going on for her. (People say pretty much the same thing about Austin, so I guess there’s a lot of that going around.)

Out on the beach, most of the buildings seem brand new (built after the last hurricane?), but in town they all look like they’ve outlasted a hundred hurricanes – some of them only just barely, but still they’re here.

Out of town, the beach is 15 minutes away. It’s just beach. There’s plenty of parking, but beyond that, nothing to mar the scenery. Just miles and miles of beautiful sand, sky and ocean.

But so much for relaxation. On to our next destination: Palm Bay, FL to drop the car off with Wade and Chris while we’re gone. Then we’re off; just the two of us, to our next destination.

 

We spent December with the kids in Florida. It was good to see another stage of the grandkids, Connor and Ava, becoming themselves. They’re both doing well in school – Connor got all A’s except for one B, and Ava no longer struggles with math, which we are glad to see. Ava is developing a taste for the finer things in life: lobster and fresh raspberries; Connor is an adventurer, ready to plunge on into the wilderness when Papa is thinking about snakes and poison ivy.

We listened to audio books on the way down and back: on the way down it was The Boys in the Boat, the true story of the University of Washington 8-man rowing team that won gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (That’s not a spoiler: the author reveals the outcome at the beginning.) It’s an inspiring story about perseverance, surrendering the self and a hundred other things. Maggie and I didn’t know a thing a rowing at the beginning and now we feel like we have the beginnings of an appreciation for the sport. The story was so compelling we actually looked forward to getting back in the boat – uh, car – and hearing more about Joe Rantz and the rest of the team.

On the way back the book was The Nightingale, a fictional story about the women of a French village during the Nazi occupation. It’s an engaging story in a completely different sense. Never mind the whipsaw we had of going from  testosterone to estrogen, it’s a slower, quieter story – at least at the beginning, which is as far as we’ve gotten. I like it because it’s finely observed and highly visual; Maggie gets a lot out of food descriptions, which break the story from time to time, but they work because the breaks emphasize the importance of food to people under extreme rationing.

Back in Austin, we are without a permanent home in our “home” town. We’re renting a condo that has just enough space for the essentials,  while the rest sits safely in a storage unit. The experience is teaching us what we value and how easy it is to do without all that other stuff.

It’s essential that we do without some of it, because it’s buried in the rest of our stuff in the overjammed little unit. We’ve made one visit to the storage unit, which was like Christmas where you don’t get everything you want. We got a lot of warm clothes, but for some reason the stereo and the winter coats are buried in the back someplace. Time for a trip to Goodwill and the pawn shop to pick up some temporary replacements.

It’s also liberating being in a familiar place with no familiar routine: no jobs, no commitments other that the ones we choose. Nothing to do but enjoy ourselves and plan the next phase: wandering around in Europe for a few months, seeing places that we’ve read about but haven’t visited, for one reason of another. It makes us kind of here and kind of not. I feel like our feet are not quite touching the ground.

 

 

Clay and I survived the packing, the move of our remaining furniture to storage, and the long drive to Florida. The drive? What a pleasant experience. We both love audio books, and we found a good one – The Boys on the Boat!

The month of December was the first month living from vacation rental to vacation rental. To say that December 2015 was amazing is an understatement. We arrived at our “Green Castle” early December, and fell in love with this lovely old (1926) home with its original wood floors, and ideal location – walking distance to downtown Melbourne. It didn’t take but minutes to unpack, set up our new “home” and then lickety-split, we’re off to see Wade, Chris and their two children (Ava & Connor).

The time spent with family included not only the Melbourne family, but my sister, Peggy, and her husband, Milton, my daughter, Wendy, and lastly my brother, Paul, and my sister-in-law, Susan. What a perfect way to begin our new life on the road with family visiting us in our Green Castle.

On December 22 we closed on our condo in Austin. What should have been an easy task turned into a gut wrenching experience. As Clay mentioned, the “the rain came” to Austin. A few days before the closing, our upstairs neighbor’s balcony sprung a leak, which dripped water down the windows of our condo. Of course, the potential buyers were going nuts (understandably I might add). Workmen came out and took care of the leak, including water tests to prove our windows were sound, as we already knew. The problem was the upstairs balcony caulking needed repairing, and the HOA took care of it.

However, the potential buyers took this as an opportunity to extort some extra money. On the day of closing, while we are at the bank in Melbourne notarizing the paperwork for the sale, we got a call from our realtor saying that the buyers needed $3K from us as insurance against future problems. Future problems? Needless to say, they knew the association had agreed it was their issue to fix – not the condo owner. After thinking about what little $3K is compared to the total amount of money, we caved and gave them their money, which we regarded as extortion, and moved on with the sale. My only consolidation is that if they call us to ask any questions about the appliances, etc, I will happily answer for $3K. J By the way, our wonderful realtor took half the money out of her commission, so it turned out we were only out $1.5K the day of the closing. *%#@!.

Regrets:

Clay and I had an interesting conversation about regrets. None! We have lived in several homes/condos over the past 33 years, and to be honest, we have never looked back with any regrets for moving on. I have some of my friends and family to say to us “How could you have left they beautiful home in Travis Heights? We (I) loved that house!” Well, so did we, but we desired a different life style, and that is what this recent change really is all about. We want to travel!

What a day! We got plumbing problem #1 fixed (we needed a new kitchen faucet), then the garbage disposal went out – luckily it was just jammed, so Steve, our building maintenance guy, fixed it in a few minutes. (I used to have the tool to unjam a garbage disposal, but after the Memorial Day flood, all of my Allen wrenches rusted into one big glob.) I replaced a light bulb, and it blew out the first time I turned it on. Today we got a notice from the condo association hinting that we’re due for another assessment. Maggie and I aren’t sure, but we think that the universe is trying to tell us something. We’re not taking any chances; we’re getting out of here and not looking back.

We’re almost all boxed up, except for one picture – I didn’t get enough large picture boxes, so i went back to the store where I got them, and they said they had never heard of any such thing. They didn’t have any, they weren’t in the price book, and was I sure I hadn’t been hallucinating? We’ll have to wrap that one up and store it ourselves.

The place is a proper mess. Here’s what it used to look like:

Here’s what it looks like now:

 

Tomorrow, the movers come and take away the boxes and furniture, so it will look different again. We’ll be sleeping on the Murphy bed until Thursday, when we hit the road for Florida. We’re just hoping nothing else breaks in the mean time.

 

Maggie and I are preparing to sell everything that’s attached to the ground and fly the coup.After 33 years of marriage and twenty years in Austin, we need to make a change. Otherwise, we’re afraid we’ll stagnate, which is a thing we both dread. Not that Austin is conducive to stagnation. There’s plenty going on here to keep us interested for a long time. It’s more like a desire to see the world. We want to go places and hang out for a while, getting a flavor for what it’s like to live in a totally different environment. We want to do all that now while we still can.

Right now we’re in the middle of packing up for the move. The movers don’t come until Dec. 1, but neither one of us is the type to wait until the last minute and then do it in a panic. At least, I’m not any more. It’s no fun unpacking when you’ve thrown a bunch of stuff into a box that doesn’t belong together, then tape the box up and mark it “misc.” (Speaking from experience.)

Yesterday a nice young couple came and bought all of our bedroom furniture: bed, bedside table, TV armoire that we were using as a linen closet, credenza, book case. All of it nice enough, but the bed and armoire were too big, the book case too small, the bedside table too cheap and the credenza had become a junk collector. (That’s the only thing that I’ll miss, just because I like saying “credenza.”) Nathan and Anna were getting rid of their college furniture, buying their first real house and they were happy to take it away. They were so cute it would have been worth just giving them the stuff just to hang around them, but instead we sold it for pennies on the dollar, and we’re all happy. Maggie and I are sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Feeling very Zen until we get up in the morning and realize that our knees aren’t happy bending like that any more. It’s only for a couple of weeks then we hop in the car and start the first leg of the journey.

The house is in good shape except the sprayer fell off the dishwasher and the sink sprung a leak over the weekend. It could have waited a couple of weeks, but no. The plumber comes tomorrow, right after the appraiser. (Wait – shouldn’t that have already happened?) We’re apprehensive that our buyer can swing the loan, but hopeful it will be OK. Plumbing we can fix, this other thing is out of our control.