July 5, 2023 – Tuesday: Driving To Columbia

We didn’t need to leave early this morning, so we took our time and left our Airbnb in Ellijay, Georgia, around 10:30 AM. We took a zigzag route, first on country roads, then we picked up Interstate 85 near Gainesville, GA and stayed on interstates the rest of the way.

We stopped to eat our picnic lunch at a small park in Gainesville. Patti enjoyed her sandwich of sourdough bread, edamame and cheese. That was her own culinary creation.

We got to our house sit in Columbia around 4:15 PM and met our hosts, Keith and Zina. They gave us the house tour and instructions for caring for the dogs and other stuff. Then we unloaded the car and unpacked a bit.

We’re are staying in a 100-year-old house in a historic area of downtown Columbia. Here it is from the street, you can see my Prius parked in the driveway.

Here’s the formal dining room.

The Pool Room is big. Keith and Zina have spent a lot of time in Africa and have decorated their place with photos that they have taken. We’re using the pool table as a place to keep some of our stuff.

The kitchen has a dining nook where we are keeping our laptop.

The living room has a very comfortable sofas and a TV.

Our bedroom is roomy. Patti will gripe at me about this picture because she had some clothes laid out on the bed when I took it that make the picture look messy.

Here’s our bathroom. The shower works well and doesn’t leak!

Up the stairs is a really nice personal gym we can use.

It has its own bathroom.

There’s also a half bath in the front hallway we can use.

The backyard is nice, with a large concrete driveway area, grass, and a gazebo.

There’s a covered table on the back patio.

Meet the pets! Here’s Kiva, a 6-year-old Boxer mix.

Matoke, a 14-year-old mixed breed the owners adopted in Africa, he was a street dog.

The dogs are quite well behaved and friendly. They like sitting with me on the bench in the gazebo.

July 6, 2023 – Thursday: Organizing, Planning, and Shopping

The dogs are pretty easy here, in the morning they go out when one of us first gets up. Then around 7AM they get breakfast. They each get a heaping scoop of dry dog food with a little bit of canned food mixed in, and Matoke, being old, gets a couple of joint supplement chews and a pain pill. Then after breakfast they get a walk around the neighborhood.

In case you’re interested in this city where we’re staying now.

“Columbia is the capital city of the U.S. state of South Carolina. With a population of 136,632 at the 2020 census, it is the second-most populous city in South Carolina. The city serves as the county seat of Richland County, and a portion of the city extends into neighboring Lexington County. It is the center of the Columbia Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had a population of 829,470 in 2020 and is the 7th largest urban center in the Deep South and the 72nd-largest metropolitan statistical area in the nation. The name Columbia is a poetic term used for the United States, derived from the name of Christopher Columbus, who explored for the Spanish Crown. Columbia is often abbreviated as Cola, leading to its nickname as “Soda City.””

We can tell people we lived in Soda City for a week.

About five blocks from us is a popular urban area called “Five Points,” according to their website:

“Five Points is a village unlike any other located in the heart of downtown Columbia, South Carolina.  Surrounded by 7+ residential neighborhoods, the University of South Carolina, a buzzing metropolitan, government agencies and supportive military community, this century old destination has something for everyone!”

Our hosts recommended some of the restaurants there, so we walked down there today and ate at The Gourmet Shop which is a very popular place with fancy wines and delicatessen items and a restaurant.

We decided to buy a new laptop computer. Our Dell laptop is five years old and has been acting up recently, including saying that it can’t detect the hard drive when it boots up sometimes. It has been a great computer, but I think it’s nearing the end of its useful life.

Today after lunch we drove out to a big shopping area and went to the Costco there to look at their laptops. Then we went next door to Best Buy where they had a very large selection of laptops and the guys there were quite helpful. After that, we went next door to Walmart to see if they had laptops. Finally, we went by Publix on the way home.

This afternoon I spent about two hours on our old Dell laptop, which luckily was working well, researching various laptop options on the internet. We decided to buy the Lenovo Flex 7i that we saw at Costco. It has the 13^th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1355U processor, 16 GB of RAM (LPDDR4), and a one TB SSD. I’ve never owned a Lenovo before, but my research today suggested that it’s a good company, the laptops are durable and reliable, and customer support is good.

July 7, 2023 – Friday: More Legwork

Today we had lunch down at Five Points again at a Poké Bowl restaurant. Neither of us has ever had a Poké Bowl, so it was a new experience. I’ve been avoiding them because they look a little scary to me, for some reason I can’t explain.

But, it was a pleasant experience.

“Poke /poʊˈkeɪ/ (Hawaiian for “to slice” or “cut crosswise into pieces”; sometimes anglicised as ‘poké’ to aid pronunciation) is diced raw fish served either as an appetizer or a main course and is a popular dish in Hawaii. Traditional forms are aku (skipjack tuna) and heʻe (octopus). Heʻe poke is sometimes called tako poke in places where the Hawaiian language is not spoken. Poke differs from other raw fish dishes in that it does not use citrus fruits as a curing agent. For example, some Native Hawaiians add salt to preserve raw fish.”

At this restaurant it’s just a bowl with rice at the bottom then other ingredients on top.

I got one with brown rice, seaweed, ginger, carrot, edamame, and tuna, salmon, and shrimp. Patti got a vegetarian one and we both liked it. I’ll get Poké again.

After lunch we went to Costco and bought the Lenovo computer, did some other shopping, then headed home with our purchases.

July 8, 2023 – Saturday: Lenovo and Lunch

I spent quite a bit of time today getting the new computer up and running. It was much easier than other computers I’ve bought in the past. The companies seem to keep working on making things as easy and idiot-proof as possible. By the end of the day, we both had logins and all the software was updated. Our Microsoft accounts brought in all the setup and files from our old Dell laptop automatically, so we had everything we needed. I bought the 4-year extended warranty plan from Lenovo, because I worry about our lifestyle being hard on a laptop and Lenovo does actually have global support so we can probably get service no matter where we are in the world. I logged into our McAfee account and got the virus protection installed and updated.

We walked down to Five Points again for lunch and went to Home Team BBQ where Patti got to try Brunswick Stew for the first time. The food was excellent.

We both went for jogs later in the day around the neighborhood.

July 9, 2023 – Sunday: Not Too Much

I did the routine with the dogs this morning, then around 11:30 we drove down to Five Points and got lunch at the restaurant of Patti’s choice, a burger place, which was good. After that we went by REI so Patti could exchange the in-soles she bought there yesterday for a different pair that felt better. After that, we drove by the capital buildings and some of the University of South Carolina campus, which were pretty, and went by Publix on the way home. Patti spent the afternoon working on packing for international travel. She’s trying to eliminate things from her checked bag to get it down to 40 pounds. I got on the elliptical machine for an hour then just watched some TV and vegetated for the rest of the afternoon.

July 10, 2023 – Monday: Rain and Cousins

It was raining when we got up this morning but there was a break in the precipitation around 9AM, so that’s when I took the dogs out for their walk.

At lunchtime we went to Five Points again to have lunch with my cousin Ed and his wife Debbie at Pawley’s Front Porch. The last time we saw them was in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands February 2022, when we were staying there for a month and they were there on vacation. They live in Columbia and make several trips a year. Most recently they were in Colorado for a week visiting with their daughter and hiking.

We spent the afternoon finishing up some packing projects and I went for a jog. Then a little after 8PM our hosts, Keith and Zina, got home from their vacation. We talked to them for a while. They are interesting people and have spent a lot of time in Africa. They have educated me a little bit on traveling around Africa, which is cool.

Miscellaneous Prep for International Travel:

We’re planning to be out of the US for at least four months so these past five days we’ve done a number of small preparatory things and I want to list a few of them here.

• Do we need a four-month supply of everything?
  • Of course not, almost anything we need in the way of consumables we’ll be able to buy in Norway
  • Except, I am taking a four-month supply of my Centrum multivitamins because they’re small, I can put them in a ziplock bag which gets smaller as they’re used, and vitamins have been quite expensive in other countries we’ve been in.
  • I’m also taking five months of batteries for my hearing aid and my cochlear implant sound processor. They can also be expensive overseas and they are lightweight and small. They are also safe for travel because they are zinc-air, not lithium ion.
• Liquids – we don’t take much in the way of liquids in our carryon bags, but in our checked bags we both take some stuff. For my part I had to decide how many ounces of which liquids I want to pack and how much I just want to buy in Norway. Because, really, everywhere in the world we’ve been I can always find shampoo and skin lotion so how much of that kind of liquids do I really need in my checked bag? Also, all the reusable bottles I can find are only 3 ounces since that’s been TSA’s limit for a few years but that’s really pretty small and doesn’t last long. So, this time I bought an 8-ounce bottle of skin lotion, for example, that I’ll pack in my checked bag, and when that runs out, I’ll just buy more wherever we are. In the US it’s actually hard to find smaller bottle sizes of these things, most bottles are 16 ounce or larger, but that gets too big and heavy for me to want to pack. So I tried to find a happy medium for bottle size, big enough to last at least a couple of weeks, but not so big that my checked bag is overly weighed down by it.
• We both wear orthotics in our shoes, to alleviate foot pain. We like to walk long distances and be on our feet a lot and the orthotics help us achieve that. So, we went to REI and got new over-the-counter orthotics to have for this trip. For me they will be backups for the new custom orthotics that I got from a podiatrist in Fort Myers recently. Patti also has a pair of custom orthotics she’s had for several years.
• We bought a new computer, I already told you about that. I didn’t want to be out of the country this long with a computer that is glitchy.
• We bought two of these cool international travel power strips with adapters for the supply but the receptacles are all US. So, we’ll be able to plug it into the wall wherever we are in the world using the appropriate adapter, and then just plug our US equipment into the US plugs in the strip.
  • Important Note: DO NOT just use a US power strip for this. Our voltage is 120 volts in the US but most countries where we’re going use 220 volts so you need to use a power strip with a 120V/240V rating.

• This was the description on Amazon: “European Travel Plug Adapter, WRXDMC International Travel Plug Adapter, US to UK Europe Plug Adapter, Power Strip for EU/UK/US, 3 USB Ports, 3 AC Outlets, 5ft Cord, Travel necessities in most countries”
• We bought a box of 1-pint Ziplock freezer bags to use to all kinds of things including small bottles of liquids, loose pills like vitamins, and spare AAA and AA batteries.
• We have finished loading our Packing Cubes and deciding how we’re going to load them into our checked bags. We’ve never used packing cubes before but we’re both liking them so far. They keep things more organized and when we get to an Airbnb it will be faster unpacking.

Future Plans:

• July 11 – 12: We’ll be staying with friends of ours at their house in Bonneau, South Carolina
• July 13 – 14: We’re stopping by Sarasota to put our domestic travel gear back in the storage unit and get our international travel gear. We’ll be spending two nights in a Quality Inn Motel.
• July 15 – 16: We’re driving over to my brother’s place in Mulberry, Florida to see him and his wife and drop off my car, which they will keep for me while we’re out of the country. We’ll pick up a rental car at the Avis place in Lakeland.
• July 17: We’re driving to FLL (Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport) and taking a Norse Atlantic flight to Oslo, Norway. Ticket cost is $1,022 for both of us one way.
• July 18 – 26: We’ve got Airbnb reservations at an Airbnb in Oslo
• July 27: We’re flying Norwegian Airlines from Oslo to Longyearbyen.
• July 27 – August 2: We’ve got an Airbnb reservation for a place in Longyearbyen.
• August 2: We have flight reservations on SAS to go from Longyearbyen to Tromsø.
• We’re thinking we’ll stay for a few days in Tromsø then head south down the coast of Norway. We’ll make reservations as we go.
• October 17 – December 3: No plans yet.
• December 3 – 9: I’ll be participating in research in Durham, North Carolina at the Med-El facilities there. Med-El is the company that made my cochlear implant and they’re going to put us up in a hotel and I’ll spend 9AM to 4PM for 5 days that week being a lab rat. They say they will test various new programming options for my cochlear implant with the goal of improving their systems. It should be fun, I’m looking forward to it.
• December 9: We’ll drive to Bradenton, Florida
• December 9 – 31: We’ve reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida, where we stayed last year around this time. We’re looking forward to singing in the Christmas Choir again.

2024

• January through April: we plan to travel through Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama. We don’t have any reservations yet.
• May and June: We’ve reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida again and we’ll spend these two months getting our yearly medical stuff done and visiting with family and friends. May and June are “off-season” here, and the rate is $56 per night for these 61 days, which is pretty good for a place like this in this location. In season, January through March, the price doubles.