Janet and Mark's Retirement Trips

  Me in a Pub with a Pint! Late in 2022, Janet was trolling around the United Airlines site and blurted out, "hey, flights to London have really come down...you want to go to London in March?" London is neck and neck as my favorite with Paris and Munich, so I said, "Sure!" and over the second cup of coffee, we had the flight, an AirBnB right by Covent Garden and Chinatown and close to five different Tube stations...all booked that morning!  Later Janet scored London Theater tickets as well, amazed by the much lower prices than NYC/Broadway. On February 7, 2023 we took the usual non-stop from SFO to Heathrow, a nice and uneventful flight, and we did a bit of walking to get to the Heathrow Express (on an English Pound per kilometer basis, it's the most expensive train ride in the UK...such as the price for convenience) but the 17 minute trip puts you in to Paddington Station and then we Uber'd to our AirBnB. Oy, as we spied our location: we rented it based on ...

  With 30+ baseball trips, and our epic road trip to Oshkosh Airventure2021, Alaska would bag me my 50th state, so when Janet proposed a WindStar Alaska cruise, I was all in.  We had taken WindStart trips before: in 2012 around Italy and up the Dalmatian Coast for our 25th Anniversary and in 2016 in French Polynesia for our (soon to come) 30th Anniversary, so we knew the trip would be on a small ship with naturalists a plenty for us to learn all about Alaska and its wildlife.  Their Alaska cruise went north from Vancouver, BC up the Inside Passage to Seward, AK, and Janet tossed in the "Let's take both trips, north and south!" so we ended up with 23 total days on the boat, with only two stops duplicated coming back to Vancouver.  What the hell...why not?!? We had a later flight to Vancouver, and Karen, now living in Millbrae just up from SFO, had her sorority sisters (and my Fans!) in town, so we made pizzas in their new pizza oven and baked chocolate chip cookies to...