I enjoyed the Austria/Germany trip a lot — a neck of the woods I've not visited before. The food (as a tour) was decent, the beer was excellent, the accommodations minimalist-modern but comfortable for the purpose, the sights lovely, our travel agent / tour director excellent, the people we ran into reasonably friendly.
The kids, by the way, were great. There were minimal problems, and we enjoyed being around them (even Percussion 🙂 ).
Still, it was good to sleep in our bed last night, be entertained by our own DVR, bake our own coffee cake this morning, shower in our own shower, and have a full closet to choose clothes from. And just sitting around (ish) rather than running to the next scenic photo op like a manic pilgrim was refreshing.
On the other hand, it wasn't until I got back that I realized how nice it was not to be focused every day (especially 8-5, but to a lesser degree 24×7) on the Job Hunt: searching for jobs, networking, juggling this and that and the other things, going to meetings, tracking my dwindling unemployment maximum, and all that jazz. It helped (at least during the time) that the Verizon Visual Voice Mail apparently doesn't actually work purely through data but requires some level of phone service connectivity (which makes no sense, but is apparently the case); that's given me some stuff to follow up on Monday morning.
The cats are pleased to see us, though they are now even more convinced that anyone stepping into the kitchen is doing so in order to give them kitty treats.
The house was still intact when back; the blizzard from Wednesday is still in big heaps in the yard, but the driveway and roads were all clear and dry. Colorado's good that way. It was nice to be able to contact the Nest from airport and tell it to start bringing the house back up to a comfortable temp well before we got home.
Dorothy had it right. Though it's technicolor where we live, too.
Yes, there was much happiness to be in the one true bed with the one true pillow.
The plan was to stay up until 10pm to try and get on a regular schedule. We sat down at 8 to watch a show we recorded and promptly fell asleep.
+Dave Hill Nailed it. The best thing about traveling is coming home. And +Stan Pedzick . "The one true bed, and the one true pillow."
Says it all. ;^>