When we checked into our overwater villa yesterday they mentioned to us that we had a sunrise view and not to miss it in the morning. Jenn and I joked that we’d probably never be up early enough to see a sunrise but this morning we were up a little after 5AM and watched the sky turn from pitch black to a beautiful sunny morning. It was a beautiful way to start our 12th wedding anniversary something that wasn’t lost on either of us as we sat gazing over the Indian Ocean on our loungers.

The flight to the Maldives was nearly 20-hours worth of flying, not to mention we had an 8-hour layover in Abu Dhabi. So although this is a post about September 18th it does contain a few hours of September 17th when we arrived in Abu Dhabi.

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.