Germany Trip Step 2: The Invitation

Yes, this is backwards. First, make reservations. Second, get invitation. 

Of course the invitation came first. Peter said, come for an extended stay, like two months. 

I said, when are you going to be free? Spring break?

He took a look and said yes, he would be back from working in Japan by Mar 1. 

So I had to go check out flight availability for Mar 1 before saying yes. And that led to the reservations, on the spot.

I also asked him if being there in May would be as good, or even better. But it turns out they go birding for the entire month of May. Better for us to vist earlier. 

They're super-intense about birding, he and Amanda are, and we'd never keep up. 

Another question was why he wanted us to come at all. He reminded me of the many places we were going to visit in 2020 that are still waiting for us. Yes, some, like Hungary, are off the list, but he found a concert in Vienna we could go to.... Back then we had ideas about seeing Berlin. And ... well, the new list will evolve and appear here soon.

After all, March 1 is only 2 months from today. 

Germany Trip Step 1: Make Reservations

 Some history first: We were planning a trip to Germany back in 2020. I made cruise ship reservations for it: take a repositioning cruise as far as Southampton to save ourselves from having to sit for long hours on a plane, then a quick hop by air to one of the German airports.

But then Covid. We canceled that trip.

Why Germany? Our youngest, Peter, his wife Amanda, and his 3 children have lived there for several years. (The children are Ella 16, her sister Alex 15, and her brother Miles, 12.) 

We thought it would be great to have a home base for investigating Europe. They live in a home in Bonn. They have a car. They - most of them - speak some German (and Juan and I have studied it. That was back in college). 

But things have changed in Europe. The 2020 version included a side-trip to Hungary, for example. That plan doesn't seem wise in the current political climate. 

All that was back three years ago. We're well vaccinated now. We've survived at least one bout of Covid each. We should go, that was my instant feeling.

So I made reservations.

Our American Airlines frequent flyer miles have been accumulating. I spent 62500 of them for this new round trip to Germany. I found reservations for March 1 departure and a May 1 return. 

So that was Step 1. Keep an eye out for Step 2. 

A Trip to Europe: Germany 2023 from first thoughts to ... who can say?

Our son and his wife just invited us to come stay with them in Germany for an extended period, such as for two months. 

You'll find the whole story here. 

This blog, Travels with Juan, is dedicated to many travels the two of us have taken together, some in real time, some retrospective. If you want any one of them, search by label. 

Every post for this Germany trip has the label Germany.

Travels with Juan began about 20 years ago. You can find it at TravelswithJuan.blogger.com. 

Why 23andMe is my favorite genetic-testing program

It's been years and years since I sent away my cheek swab and got my 23andMe genetic profile.

Back then - maybe 10 years ago - not may people had registered their family trees at 23&Me, so my first discoveries were not unknown cousins but 'medical' info and other genetic traits.

Here are some surprises that followed:

1. I could participate in research. 23andMe asked me if I'd be willing to answer some questions, and for these many years I've been stopping by their website and responding to their quizzes. Most take 5 minutes or so.

23andMe correlates my answers with my genes and combines my responses with those of others doing the same quiz. For example, one quiz centered on taste preferences. Did I like fresh coriander? No. That helped them home in on which gene causes some people to find coriander soapy.

I don't know the number of these little research projects I've participated in but probably 100-200.

2. I could look up genes they didn't report on. 23andMe keeps an archive of our genome and we have access to it. Here's how that's helpful:

One of my sons is a bit shorter than average yet jumps really high in an important way: he can dunk the basketball. So he was curious if he had a special gene for fast-twitch muscles. He searched Google to find the actual gene responsible, then asked me to look it up in 23&Me to see if I had it. I was amazed that I could do that! Pick a gene and they will let you know which variation you have, what you have inherited.

3. More recently I had a serious issue to research: docs thought my sister had Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is hereditary (in part) so it was scary to hear we might have it in our family. But I was surprised because I remember well getting my 23andMe report and having to give special permission to see if I had a gene for Alzheimer's (also special permission to learn about a susceptibility to Parkinson's), and I did not have the Alzheimer's gene (that they knew about back then).

So I looked up the gene in my personal archives that 23andMe keeps for me, and found I had much lower than average chance of getting Alzheimer's. And that could easily apply to my sister, too. At least she couldn't have a large tendency to it. So with this information the doc reconsidered and discovered a thyroid problem.

4. And while I was looking at my archive, I found a few things I had forgotten: that I had low risk for cardiovascular disease, also for A-fib. Isn't that nice to know? And I didn't have the main breast cancer gene, either.

5. The results that mean the most to me are included in a separate report from these health-oriented ones. It is the report on my mitochondrial (or Mothers') line. Not all companies report on this, and most folks don't miss it until they start reading about it. For now, let's just say it is the most important result I received from 23andMe.

6. And then there are the cousins. I have discovered many, and some of those were not very distant. But this too is another story.

Conclusion: 23andMe is my favorite. it has given me insights, knowledge, hope, and relatives. And through the mitochondrial reporting, keys to my deep history, food preferences and allergies, and clues about my metabolism.

A final thought: 23andMe keeps our genetic archives so when new discoveries are made, we can apply them to ourselves immediately, without further testing. That's a real bonus and who knows what we'll learn because of it over time.

I've told so many people about 23andMe that I got a referral link. Here it is. If you're interested in more information, please use it: https://refer.23andme.com/s/anacopeg

Father's Day 2016 - Changes in a context of 'the eternal us'

Travels with Juan these years take place on the road, in the air, in our minds and hearts, and in our bodies. It's all a journey, right?

Here we are, transitioning from our early to our mid-70s. We love where we are in life. But there's no denying that however we look at it, the journey ahead will be shorter than the one we've already taken.

Retirement is not what we thought it might be mostly I suppose because we are both still working!

For one, Juan is now the Chief Scientist of Deep Space Industries.

And since that was an unexpected development and a whole journey in itself, I want to record some of its features and challenges here.

Background: Juan in his persona as Dr John S Lewis, Planetary Scientist at MIT and then the University of Arizona, wrote a book called Rain of Iron and Ice, and then another, Mining the Sky. These were published originally in the late 80s. They were received with great interest, mostly in the category of 'great idea - if only...'

Then, twenty years later and not long ago, entrepreneurs and space aficionados put their heads together and created companies around the ideas he was proposing, including the promise of vast wealth from mining asteroids.

One of those companies, Deep Space Industries, hired him on as Chief Scientist.

Since then he has been busy at work helping bring his mid-life ideas into reality.

One major passion of his is to make space activities more affordable by providing propellants for space-faring from space materials. That means not lifting them from Earth, which costs about $5000 a pound - for example $5000 to lift a pint of water.

Instead, water would be brought downhill from asteroids and dead comets to Earth orbit. Down is easier than up! And water makes the best propellants.

The whole story is fascinating and I recommend the books as a starting point. They are written for interested non-scientists, and are just about as up-to-date now as when they were written.

You can also check out his blog at http://johnslewis.com.

So retirement is not as we expected. We'd thought about travel, and feeding ourselves from our garden, and we can do that. And Juan always expected to write science fiction and he's doing that as I write this.

He also picks raspberries endlessly.

This Father's Day we celebrate good health and good times together and the exhilaration of being able to work at what we love: space, science, writing, the garden - and family here and there and yon. We're grateful we've been able to keep doing what we love, however long it may be.

On The Road Again Spring 2015

We hit the road again on the last day of April 2015 and returned a week into June.

It's not easy leaving a garden for 5 or 6 weeks, but we had the sure knowledge that it always rains in Anacortes in May. Every day. So it was the perfect time to go: nothing would be ready to harvest till we got back, and we could stretch the trip out into June and come home to healthy baby veggies.

And weeds. And grass. Yes, we knew we would have that to cope with. But an excuse for a cross-country road trip was enough incentive to get us past worrying about these.

The overall purpose was to go to my college reunion, in fact my 50th reunion. Yes, I am that old. And at this age you don't want to wait 5 years for the next reunion or you'll miss some old friends. Permanently.

(This kind of talk doesn't bother me. If there's anything about being 72 it's that we might as well be honest about all of life, including the inevitability of death. That said, I don't quite believe it because I feel very much alive, but I get it intellectually, and I'm not going to mince words about it.)

The reunion was at Smith College in Northampton MA. That is something like 3000 miles from our home in WA. But this was not to be an out-and-back trip. Why not see friends and family along the way?

In the end we swung around in a big arc to 28 states, saw 63 real friends and family members (not counting children or mere acquaintances), met several new cousins, got caught in bad storms going and returning, and had a blast. We did close to 9000 miles and listened to several audiobooks. We got behind in newsletters and phone calls and of course the lawn mowing. It was vast and grand and we even got to spend a few hours at Badlands in South Dakota, one of the few tourist excursions of the trip.

And then we got home and found there had been a drought, right here in the Pacific Northwest. The lawn did not need mowing - it was brown. The weeds were likewise not much of a problem. And basically all the crops had failed due to lack of water.

So we had sparse pickings from the many garden boxes we had so earnestly planted before leaving.

Some crops picked up again after a few days of irrigating, such as the raspberries. The chard somehow did marvelously despite the lack of moisture, as thank heavens did the baby fruit trees.

But where we should be eating our own carrots, we are buying them from the farmers' market. We can't live on just chard, and the few plants of kale, the rhubarb, and whatever peas were not too doughy to enjoy - these are all that survived the rain-free month of May.

It's ok. The rains proceeded to stay away all summer, and have just started in this week. That schedule is typical. No one believes we have a drought here. It's due to the mountains on the Olympic peninsula to the west of us, which create a rain shadow here in our area (but not in the areas around us, which stay wet and green all summer, as is thought to be typical of the PNW). Now we have baby choys and cabbages and peas and carrots sprouting. The harvest will commence by late fall and continue through winter.

What would not have survived the lack of watering was the many friendships along the way. These can't withstand too many droughts or they will perish while we're not attending to them.

So all in all it was a great trip, one excuse to go with the result of miles of delightful experiences. I'll write some specifics another time.

Reflections on the Journey on Father's Day

It is Father's Day. We don't make much of it in our family but it's all around us, and that has caused me to reflect on this journey with this man.

We started our life together 50 years ago this past spring, and will be celebrating our 50th anniversary on August 1. Fifty years sounds long when you're young. It doesn't seem that way anymore.

We hope for many many more years together. We've had our ups and downs and have stuck together. He traveled a lot when he was a young professor while I stayed at home with the kids. He's still been to many places I'll never see. At other times I've traveled without him. But almost always we have been glued at the hip.

We raised 6 children together. They were spread over nearly 17 years, oldest to youngest, and their lives were different depending on whether they came in our late childhood (early 20s) or old age (nearly 40). Our style of parenting was probably best described as juggling. Juggling finances, time pressures, priorities (homework or the next chapter of Lord of the Rings?).

We looked forward with a passion to the next summer's vacation and were completely of one accord about where to go: Northern Canada, to the end of the road, a new section each year. Eastern Canada for the older kids, Western Canada for the younger ones. We tented in the beginning, then had a travel trailer.

We always had books, we always did hikes, we always ate very well despite cooking on a Coleman stove.

We are both chemists. For me it was something that allowed me to understand, for him it was his career: space chemistry. We shared a passion for space, something we both discovered at age about 8. We also both had and still have a passion for family, and for family histories.

It's been a sweet journey, and sometimes a stressful one. I knew he was my guy when I met him. We're really quite alike in so many ways, but also a good balance: he is calm, I am volatile; he is inward, I am a bit inward but less so; I am smart, he is remarkably and terribly terribly smart. I am wild, he is tame. Neither of us is yet really old (yay!). He's the prep chef, I'm the kitchen boss. He's the willing sampler, he has the better sense of smell, I'm better on the computer, we both love words, and numbers.

We have plans, lots of plans, books to write, places to see, thoughts to think, cuddles to cuddle. There will never be enough time.

So for now we'll just celebrate the 50 years' journey to this current stopover, and mention too Happy Father's Day, Juan! I'm so glad you're the father of my kids!