Family stress followed by three weeks in Europe
25 September 2023
We had several weeks clear before the European trip, so I organised for the floor inside our front door to be replaced. It had been damaged months earlier by water from a leak in the box gutter three floors above. We were confident that the leak had been repaired, so we committed to a few days entering and leaving through the garage while the floating floor was replaced. We also spent some weekends at Sorrento, getting a little sun and stoking the wood heater.
Suddenly the “clear time” was occupied when the nursing home where my mother has lived since 2012 gave four weeks notice that it was being closed so that the operator could use the land for more profitable apartment development. My sister and I hastily inspected several nearby facilities and were pleased with the range and apparent quality of places available. After two weeks, we organised to transfer her to The Malvern Centre run by MecwaCare.
The other task for the weeks before the vacation was getting “in shape” for a Summer vacation near the end of Australia’s Winter. With help from my trainer Jay Kennedy, we followed a diet and training plan which was similarly effective to the one from earlier in the year and we were both happy with the results by the time the end of August came.
For Jay’s birthday I had booked tickets for Lizzo's concert tour and a degustation meal at Underbar, a fairly new restaurant in Ballarat. We stayed at the boutique hotel within which the restaurant is housed. It was a fun degustation and very keenly priced compared with similar offerings in Melbourne. We also took the opportunity to try one of the gyms in Ballarat.
On the way home we had a nostalgic meal at one of the local McDonald’s which still had the fixed seating and tiffany lamps of our childhoods.
Jay went to the SIGGRAPH meeting in Los Angeles at the start of August. It was a very short trip but he still had the opportunity to see Derek and a free day to tour Universal Studios. They had added and changed a lot of the attractions since we were last there.
While Jay was away I attended the second birthday of the Victorian Pride Centre. We had been pleased to help support the centre and it was good to see it busy and being well-used.
Before leaving for Europe, we firmed up plans for Christmas in Palm Springs and also started looking at a trip to Canada and the US next June to visit Jay’s family and maybe visit the East Coast of the US for the first time since 2016. We also had to plan costumes for the themed events on the cruise which was the first part of the European vacation.
By the weekend before we were due to leave it had become clear that we were not going to be able to get mum into her usual care routine at The Malvern Centre. The idea of moving her again was something I had very much tried to avoid, but I finally had to agree with my sister and with all mum’s private carers. We rapidly organised a place at Heritage Care Northcote because many of the staff involved in her regular care over the past decade were now working there. The location is a longer drive for my sister, but the need for carers familiar with her needs outweighed that consideration. The actual move occurred while I was in Rome about to board the cruise ship, so my sister dealt with all the physical requirements while I completed paperwork on my iPad in the hotel foyer.
It was lucky that the stressful event of my mother’s move was right at the beginning of our vacation, so that with that successfully completed I could relax on the ship where limited phone and internet access would have made dealing with problems at home very difficult. We had a free day in Rome before boarding, and used it visiting some of the sights we hadn't previously been to together, including Ostia Antica.
We had not done an Atlantis cruise since early 2020 when we took the half-empty one from New Zealand which was quiet, but still fun. This time the ship had thousands of guests and so the dance floors were much more packed and the whole mood was much more busy. We knew a few guys on the boat: Derek came from Dallas, Peter from Innsbruck and Simon from Sydney who had been with us on the Tahiti cruise. We also met quite a few guys from the US and Israel as well as Europe.
The itinerary of the cruise was disrupted by windy weather in Rome which delayed our departure. We still visited each of the planned ports and we got off the ship in every port. Having some experience of cruise-line organised tours, we decided to organise our own for all these ports as it’s relatively easy to do in Europe. We visited Pompeii, did a street food tour of Palermo, walked part of the cinqueterre and around Èze and Monaco and in Ibiza we went to the beach instead of the clubs (which we had done before). The ship itself was a step down from the Celebrity and Oceania ships we had been on before, but most of the fun was in the crowd and the events, so it didn’t matter too much.
We finished in Rome, where we went immediately to the airport to fly to Oslo. Neither of us had been to Norway or Denmark before. In Norway we visited Oslo and Bergen, the journey to Bergen including the beautiful Flåm railway and a fjord boat trip. Bergen was particularly pretty. We were lucky with the weather, with only one drizzly day out of our time in Scandinavia. Highlights included the bicycle tour of Copenhagen and the Danish Queen’s reception rooms with their modern tapestries. I have put an album of photos from the vacation online.
After 22 days away from home we were more than ready to sleep in our own bed. Jay still had status with Qantas to get us lounge access and a shower in Dubai on the way home, which made the trip a bit more pleasant. I slept about 70% of the flight from Dubai to Melbourne, but Jay had more trouble sleeping on the plane.
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Suddenly the “clear time” was occupied when the nursing home where my mother has lived since 2012 gave four weeks notice that it was being closed so that the operator could use the land for more profitable apartment development. My sister and I hastily inspected several nearby facilities and were pleased with the range and apparent quality of places available. After two weeks, we organised to transfer her to The Malvern Centre run by MecwaCare.
The other task for the weeks before the vacation was getting “in shape” for a Summer vacation near the end of Australia’s Winter. With help from my trainer Jay Kennedy, we followed a diet and training plan which was similarly effective to the one from earlier in the year and we were both happy with the results by the time the end of August came.
For Jay’s birthday I had booked tickets for Lizzo's concert tour and a degustation meal at Underbar, a fairly new restaurant in Ballarat. We stayed at the boutique hotel within which the restaurant is housed. It was a fun degustation and very keenly priced compared with similar offerings in Melbourne. We also took the opportunity to try one of the gyms in Ballarat.
On the way home we had a nostalgic meal at one of the local McDonald’s which still had the fixed seating and tiffany lamps of our childhoods.
Jay went to the SIGGRAPH meeting in Los Angeles at the start of August. It was a very short trip but he still had the opportunity to see Derek and a free day to tour Universal Studios. They had added and changed a lot of the attractions since we were last there.
While Jay was away I attended the second birthday of the Victorian Pride Centre. We had been pleased to help support the centre and it was good to see it busy and being well-used.
Before leaving for Europe, we firmed up plans for Christmas in Palm Springs and also started looking at a trip to Canada and the US next June to visit Jay’s family and maybe visit the East Coast of the US for the first time since 2016. We also had to plan costumes for the themed events on the cruise which was the first part of the European vacation.
By the weekend before we were due to leave it had become clear that we were not going to be able to get mum into her usual care routine at The Malvern Centre. The idea of moving her again was something I had very much tried to avoid, but I finally had to agree with my sister and with all mum’s private carers. We rapidly organised a place at Heritage Care Northcote because many of the staff involved in her regular care over the past decade were now working there. The location is a longer drive for my sister, but the need for carers familiar with her needs outweighed that consideration. The actual move occurred while I was in Rome about to board the cruise ship, so my sister dealt with all the physical requirements while I completed paperwork on my iPad in the hotel foyer.
It was lucky that the stressful event of my mother’s move was right at the beginning of our vacation, so that with that successfully completed I could relax on the ship where limited phone and internet access would have made dealing with problems at home very difficult. We had a free day in Rome before boarding, and used it visiting some of the sights we hadn't previously been to together, including Ostia Antica.
We had not done an Atlantis cruise since early 2020 when we took the half-empty one from New Zealand which was quiet, but still fun. This time the ship had thousands of guests and so the dance floors were much more packed and the whole mood was much more busy. We knew a few guys on the boat: Derek came from Dallas, Peter from Innsbruck and Simon from Sydney who had been with us on the Tahiti cruise. We also met quite a few guys from the US and Israel as well as Europe.
The itinerary of the cruise was disrupted by windy weather in Rome which delayed our departure. We still visited each of the planned ports and we got off the ship in every port. Having some experience of cruise-line organised tours, we decided to organise our own for all these ports as it’s relatively easy to do in Europe. We visited Pompeii, did a street food tour of Palermo, walked part of the cinqueterre and around Èze and Monaco and in Ibiza we went to the beach instead of the clubs (which we had done before). The ship itself was a step down from the Celebrity and Oceania ships we had been on before, but most of the fun was in the crowd and the events, so it didn’t matter too much.
We finished in Rome, where we went immediately to the airport to fly to Oslo. Neither of us had been to Norway or Denmark before. In Norway we visited Oslo and Bergen, the journey to Bergen including the beautiful Flåm railway and a fjord boat trip. Bergen was particularly pretty. We were lucky with the weather, with only one drizzly day out of our time in Scandinavia. Highlights included the bicycle tour of Copenhagen and the Danish Queen’s reception rooms with their modern tapestries. I have put an album of photos from the vacation online.
After 22 days away from home we were more than ready to sleep in our own bed. Jay still had status with Qantas to get us lounge access and a shower in Dubai on the way home, which made the trip a bit more pleasant. I slept about 70% of the flight from Dubai to Melbourne, but Jay had more trouble sleeping on the plane.
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