The Move

The apartment has been vacated. It took four people roughly two days to pack, load, move and unload our large collection of stuff in to a storage unit in Orlando. In case you were wondering, we have almost exactly 800 cubic feet of stuff.

How do I know this? The storage unit was roughly 5'x17'x9' to 10' (depending on pipes/ducts) and we filled it to the brim! You can't see it very well in this picture but I assure you the items are stacked to the ceiling and the door is slammed shut, just barely restraining the avalanche of furniture behind it.

The old apartment looks quite stark and bare in comparison to its usual tidy coziness. I'm sleeping on a rejected mattress and using that dying coffee table as my desk at the moment. The only thing which makes this place bearable for the last couple days is Casanova who has found a home with Ashley and Ryan and Katie Murphy for the trip. He and Ashley and Ryan's cat Casey had a little play date today to get to know one another.

Tomorrow, Gwen will be in Stuart and I will spend New Years Eve in Jacksonville with Ashley and Ryan. We will meet in Orlando and begin our journey at 1:30pm on the 1st. So wish us luck as we wish you all a very happy New Year!

Graduation!

It's official. We are now card carrying members of the Florida Tech Alumni association. Oh yeah, and we should have a couple of those degree thingies coming in the mail too. So step one on project "get out of the country" has been completed! Pictures will be added soon.

Graduation Announcements

Last night was spent exploring a new tofu pasta dish (Soba noodles with tofu and tomato sauce), eating chocolate fondue, watching WallE (or Waa-ah-aaall-EEE) and folding and addressing graduation announcements. So watch the mail! They're quite complicated including an inner and an outer envelope and then sticky seals and return addresses. They should be arriving within the next week or so perfectly within the appropriate 2 week margin as dictated by graduation announcement ettiquette.

Countdown:
6 days of class
23 days

Until Graduation!

Prelude to Trouble

This blog has been created to be a record of our travels. For those who are unaware, we are leaving January 1st from Orlando airport for Barcelona, Spain. In Barcelona, we will board the Norwegian Jade whose itinerary is as follows:

Day	Port	Arrive	Depart
Sun	Barcelona	-	7:00 PM
Mon	At Sea	-	-
Tue	Rome (Civitavecchia)	8:00 AM	8:00 PM
Wed	At Sea	-	-
Thu	Athens (Piraeus)	11:00 AM	8:00 PM
Fri	Ephesus (Izmir)	8:00 AM	5:00 PM
Sat	At Sea	-	-
Sun Mon	Alexandria	7:00 AM -	Overnight 6:00 PM
Tue	At Sea	-	-
Wed	Valletta (Malta)	11:00 AM	6:00 PM
Thu	At Sea	-	-
Fri	Barcelona	5:00 AM	-

Afterwards, we are flying directly to the London Gatwick airport where we will navigate our way to Unwin's Farm House in FinchingField so as to pester Aunt Claire and Uncle John until February 1st when we arrive safely back in Orlando.
The preparations have been made, tickets bought, hotels booked and excursions selected.... We are uber excited. Our excursions are the "Classic Rome", which includes the colosseum, roman forum and st.peter's basilica, the "Pyramids and Nile In Style", which includes (quite obviously) the pyramids and nile as well as the sphinx, cairo museum and papyrus making, and "The Magnificent Ephesus" which includes a guided tour of the ruins of Ephesus in Turkey. We also will be stopping in Athens to gawk at the parthenon and Malta to maybe play with dolphins? All in all it promises to be a most exciting trip so stay tuned for journal updates and pictures!

(If only we can graduate first...)