“We made it! PHEW.”
After a whirlwind departure from DC - and I mean this was one for the books even for the likes of me, who tends to run a little, er, tardy to things on account of trying to fit too many tasks into any given moment at once - we made it. [OK fine. Another way to say this could be: to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows me, we almost missed our flight.] But let me back up for a minute…
Last week (I write this one week into our Portugal adventure, with a calm that could only come from a slight distancing from the events I’m about to describe…) was a lot. On Monday we said goodbye to dear friends; on Tuesday we sold our car (drove to Carmax in the Toyota, test drove a Mercedes - OK fine put Luca inside of one very briefly as a photo op - and left in an Uber); on Wednesday Juan dropped off our pets at their new temporary homes with friends while I worked my final day in the office and bid all my colleagues of 7 years adieu (a workday that ended at 8:30 pm on account of my completely underestimating the amount of emotion, and by the end, simply exit paperwork/related tasking involved in ending one’s career at a large organization); and on Thursday we (wait for it…) finished packing (ok largely just “packed,” and that was mostly the problem); Ubered anything that didn’t make the cut to our storage unit, where we’d already sent the remainder of our belongings after we gave up our apartment twelve days prior (it took two Ubers, and did I mention it was raining?); visited one last time with my mentee, Ana (because I hadn’t seen her and how could I not?); attempted to straighten our dear (and very, very brave) friend Travis’ place after he generously let us camp out there during our last nomadic 12 days in town; then flew by the seat of our pants (ok in another Uber) to pick our toddler Luca back up from his babysitter, Maria’s, house and bid her a tearful goodbye as well. (Note that only I arrived in the Uber, though, because partway between Travis’ and Maria’s we realized we didn’t hide Travis’s key well enough and so Juan dove out of the Uber, ran back to Travis’s, straight up buried the key in a corner of the yard, and jogged the remaining 1-2 miles to meet us at Maria’s… *I think you’re starting to get a picture here*) at which point we called our final Uber to take us, straight from Maria’s, to Dulles airport an hour away. If you’re still reading and not hyperventilating, just know that we were. (Hyperventilating, that is.) But we were also laughing, crying, and reminding ourselves that if we missed this flight, there would (most likely) be another one the next day. And we just didn’t have the energy to think much beyond that.
Blessedly, everything else was uneventful. Despite a few attempts by Luca to dodge us (and the TSA authorities) at the airport, we made it through security in a whirl, onto the flight, to our layover in Paris (let me just say we are NOT chic enough for Paris, even the airport), and then to Porto, Portugal - the country’s second-biggest city, located in the north - where we’ll be spending the next week and kicking off this extended family adventure. Luca was a gem through all of this (really, what could he have done that could compete with the chaos we’d caused ourselves over those last 24+ hours) and he even slept a bit. So. Now. All that to say. We have…ARRIVED!