I picked up Joe late Wednesday night from Logan Airport, shocked he had only brought a 40L pack. I was struggling to fit everything into a 50L pack plus the daypack I was bringing. More shocking than anything, though, was that this trip was really happening! We had loosely formulated plans for the trip last July on the roof of the Ludlow Hotel during one of my trips to Etsy’s headquarters in Brooklyn. Close to a year later we were almost off. The trip was almost all we’d talked about since December, and especially since early January when I booked my flight from San Francisco to Boston, and we both booked our flights to Lisbon.
On the way back from the airport we managed to turn a 30 minute trip into an hour one. The follies of thinking you have Google Maps enabled when you don’t. We both laughed realizing how terrible we were at navigating streets we knew when we were about to head off into foreign lands where we really wouldn’t know where we were. Still, an early spring night in Massachusetts is as peaceful as they come, so the extra leg of the journey home was welcome as we drove through countless back roads near Concord.
My mom and dad were both awake when we arrived, and we chatted for a while about the trip. My mom, too was shocked at Joe’s minimalist pack, and Joe and I worked for a while trying to get my pack down to size. Still, I wasn’t ready to get rid of a second pair of pants, yet.
Early Thursday Joe and I ran some last minute errands around Concord. We drove back through the Middlesex circle a few times (for those unfamiliar, Middlesex = the high school where Joe and I met before going to the same college, Georgetown). We parked and walked out on the dock at Bateman’s Pond to take an appreciate moment of just how nice a day it was and how interesting it was to be back here 11 years after we first met and before our trip.
Thursday evening we packed up for the final time and headed into Logan after triple checking we had our passports. I said farewell to my parents and we headed through security, past that overwhelming smell of clam chowder at Legal Seafoods, and onto our gate.
From there, things were pretty seamless, and we landed in Portugal six hours laters, 12am EST, 5am local time.