It’s been 795 days since Jenn and I last left the country on a vacation together. When we arrived back from Singapore in the summer of 2019 there was no way that we could have ever imagined such a long gap; thanks COVID. But after a lot of trial and tribulation two weeks ago we booked a 10-day trip from New York to the Maldives.

Since moving to New York in 2018 I’ve tried to go visit my family in California three to four times a year. I was planning to come visit in August but at some point I was talking to Jake and we decided to change my trip to California to a brothers trip. We looked at a few ideas but the one that we quickly landed on was Iceland a place Jake has talked about wanting to go to for a long, long time. So even with the pandemic we booked it and on August 11th we began our journey to Reykjavik, Iceland.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post about a trip. You’d have to all the way back to either February of 2020 when we did a weekend trip to Philadelphia or even further back to July of 2019 when we went to Egypt, UAE, Mumbai, and Singapore. It’s been a long road to travel again and even now after a three-night trip to Washington DC we are still battling a new “delta” outbreak of COVID-19 so the travel of 2019 still feels somewhat far away.

After nearly a year back in Newport Beach we are finally making our way back to New York City where we’ve lived and worked for the prior two years. When we came out in June of 2020 we flew from Newark to LAX on United Business Class with Frasier as an emotional support animal. Unfortunately, all of the US airlines have removed that as an option so we decided to take our Mercedes and drive from California to New York. This post will chronicle each day of the move, including our move day to commemorate the journey back.

I genuinely cannot remember the last time that Jenn and I went away for a weekend. It’s just never been our style. We have always preferred to do the big 2-3 week trips. But now that we’ve lived in New York for a little under two-years it felt almost criminal not to explore outside the confines of the island. So this past weekend we left our 700 sq ft apartment and went out in search of our first mini getaway to Philadelphia.

It took me a while but it finally hit me this morning. After Jake and I grabbed coffee again this morning a little after 8 AM at % Arabica, Jake finished up packing up his things and an hour later i was walking him down to the lobby to see him jump into a cab and take off for the airport to catch his flight home that takes him through Taipei to LAX. We said our goodbyes and he was off and thus started our last day of the trip.