On the trail again this week

This fall is packed with travel for us. Wednesday we head to Arizona to spend some time with our friends from W. Michigan who moved there....about five years ago...Jan and Gary. On the weekend we will hook up with some Penn State buddies...DTS brothers...who get together annually...or more frequently. We were with them for an overnight in Ohio in 2007. They cooked up the desert meeting then.

One of the DTSers is a guy who moved to Arizona many years ago...over thirty I think, and he insisted we visit in the fall. So off we go. We were ambivalent about going since we were going to be away to Scotland and then the cruise from Barcelona, but we decided to go for it during August. We were feeling foxy...with all our accumulated frequent fliers...so Alaska Air flies direct from Portland to Phoenix and shares miles with NWA. So we signed on knowing that there was less than three weeks between our two big trips.

It is always nice to see Jan and Gary and they are generous with their hospitality....and since Penn State is doing so well in football this year...hey, why not go spend some time with the Penn Staters too? It is PS bye weekend (most of the PA boys go to the games,) so the balloon will not burst this weekend, at least. But I gotta say they looked awesome against OSU (Ohio and Oregon.)

So, gone for a week, home for three then off for almost three weeks. We fly out towards Barcelona on Thanksgiving eve. We go to JFK, then on to Barcelona in one big swoop...so when we get there we will be punked. We have a hotel room waiting for us there, then 36 hours later go aboard the ship for our two week cruise. I will outline that cruise in another post, but suffice it to say, this is going to be an adventure.

We have no plans for the winter...and it sounds like Amy and Bren would like to escape to the sun, so we may have the boys for a week....which is fine. I am sure we will get tired of the rain around March and be anxious to seek some warmth. Let's see, Continental honors NW ffers too and they have a nice connection to Tampa....hummm.