Holy shit, it’s only been two weeks?  Apparently it’s only been two weeks.

Yesterday we went to Sacramento, because we (thought we) had some specific errands to run there, but really mostly to see friends.  A long time ago, we used to travel to Mexico for vacations, and several times we traveled with another couple who had pretty much the same priorities and pace we did.  We had some really excellent travel together.  The last trip we took together, they were still first trimester, I believe, with a kid who’s somehow 15 now, and we haven’t seen each other since despite living seven hours apart.  So it was amazing to see them again, and we need to make a point of visiting the area more often.

Our friends and planned activities were closer to Midtown, which is a delightful area, but parking challenges/concerns with the van meant I booked us a motel a bit further flung where I could be certain there was parking and it didn’t have low clearance.  That’s a problem that’s not going to go away in cities, and I’m fine staying in, you know, more functional places when that’s necessary, but the lesson learned this time is that I should probably just call the actual location and talk through my options to get a downstairs room overlooking the parking lot.  In this case, I ended up suggesting to Jay we park the van basically right up in front of the reception windows for security purposes.  We’ve made choices to keep the van from looking interesting in any way, but there’s still the fact that it’s a large white cargo van and those – especially in motel parking lots – are often filled with tools.

Most of the errands we had planned were around a) stuff I felt like we needed but didn’t bring and are a pain to obtain because we can’t get postal mail here b) solutions to Jay’s internet struggles.  But he ordered something to solve the latter, and we went ahead and booked our next rental to start next weekend instead of extending here.  We’ll be significantly closer to “town” in the next place, and I’m already kind of side-eyeing the amount of shit we have to pack back up this week, so aside from picking up one mostly modest shopping order and dropping $50 at Daiso on organizing stuff.

This past week, leading right up until we went to Sac, was a really nasty heat wave.  We got a few degrees reprieve from being next to the lake, but it was well over 100 and up to 108 every day.  It did not cool down to a reasonable temp at night, which is normally the saving grace in the hotter parts of California.  We were fine here in this little house with the beefy mini-split, but it meant we really could not have our normal Outdoor Time in the mornings or evenings.

We feel a lot more recovered from the shock and stress of the move.  We did take our chances getting both the bivalent COVID booster and the flu shot at the same time last Thursday, which made for a very unpleasant Friday but then a really impressive bounce-back unlike our previous vaccinations.

Because we arrived a week later than we’d planned, our “month” here is really barely three weeks.  That’s a mistake I will avoid in the future, and will probably look to do 5-6 weeks at each stop to give us some actual weekends in between move-in and move-out.