I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving! Our dinner with our neighbors was very nice. They are a lovely family and have always made us feel very welcome.

Today we are getting ready for our bus tour of Christmas markets in Europe. We leave tomorrow for 10 days of travel. DH’s sister will be joining us on this trip, though we are flying separately since she is in Colorado. I’m really struggling with figuring out what to take as I hate to be cold, but don’t want to overpack with things I won’t use or need. I’m leaning toward trying to pack clothes I can layer and not worry too much about trying to coordinate every outfit. I may or may not be able to check in while we are away, so if you don’t hear from me for awhile, don’t be concerned.

We set up a cat show booth this weekend. We waited AN HOUR for them to get out tables for this. You'd think the set up folks weren't getting paid to do it.

Maryanne, I thought about you last night because due to many issues we ended up missing our connecting flight from Munich back to Dallas. United sent us to a crummy Best a western hotel on Princess Garden Parkway, in Lanham, MD. I think that’s somewhere close to Baltimore? Now I’m sitting in the Dulles airport waiting for our rebooked flight to Dallas, hoping to be reunited with our luggage someday!

We got home about 5 PM today. We were rebooked once by United on a flight leaving Dulles at 8:30 this morning, but due to getting to our unimpressive hotel so late last night, I called and politely requested to be rebooked to a later flight. My initial request was denied, at which time I became a bit more forceful in my request, reminding the agent who was “assisting” me that through no fault of our own, we were stuck in a subpar hotel an hour and a half from the airport and that we would be unable to sleep for more than about 4 hours before having to head back to the airport. I asked him to escalate my request to a supervisor and when he came back on the line he agreed to put us on a flight that was scheduled to leave at 12:30 instead. Due to the high winds and rain in the Northeast today, our flight was delayed about an hour, but we did finally get home.

Until yesterday it was a great trip. We enjoyed each of the cities and the Christmas Markets were interesting. We visited Munich, Nuremberg, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and Salzburg. I especially enjoyed the markets in Nuremberg, Vienna, and Salzburg. We also saw the highlights in each of the towns we visited, so it wasn’t all shopping! We had a scary incident in Budapest where DH got disoriented and ended up lost and unable to find our meeting point during some free time at one of the Christmas Markets. I had left him alone to go to the restroom and he was supposed to meet me at the meeting point, but when I arrived there he was nowhere to be found. Several of the other passengers helped look for him, but eventually it was decided to have the rest of the group go back to the bus with the local tour guide for the day while the tour director stayed with me and SIL to continue looking for him. We finally found him by calling his cell phone and having him go into a restaurant and giving the phone to an employee who was able to tell our tour director where he was. She asked them to keep him there until we could get there and they agreed to do so. He was several blocks away and had no idea how he’d gotten so far away from where he was supposed to be. After we collected him we got in a cab and were able to rejoin the tour at the beginning of the next activity. Needless to say, after that there were numerous people keeping an eye on him.

PamS53 wrote: »

Maryanne, I thought about you last night because due to many issues we ended up missing our connecting flight from Munich back to Dallas. United sent us to a crummy Best a western hotel on Princess Garden Parkway, in Lanham, MD. I think that’s somewhere close to Baltimore? Now I’m sitting in the Dulles airport waiting for our rebooked flight to Dallas, hoping to be reunited with our luggage someday!

Sorry about the crummy motel! Most of the trip sounds great except for that scary instance!

There's a Ramada near us that is just in terrible shape. I think they are housing homeless people. I often wonder what a business traveler who accidentally wanders in there would think. What's sad is I see a school bus stop there to pick up kids in the morning.

I just had a conference call and got to hear all about their "too busy at year end woes". It was all I could do not to just say "join the club, sisters". LOL!

I think I'm 98% through my personal and CROM Christmas lists, thank goodness. DH's presents are bought and wrapped. Stockings are hung. I'm not doing much else. We've already agreed no turkey dinner, thank goodness.

I’m all set to do hand PT in FL. My PA wrote to referral and staff faxed it to the therapy center on Sanibel. I’ve used them before for shoulder and knee therapy. The old building was destroyed by Hurricane Ian in 2022 but they just moved to a new location last spring. I have appointments booked for January and February.

PamS53 wrote: »

This year hasn’t been too bad for me, for a change. The adults in the family agreed to stop exchanging gifts, so I only had to do gifts for 3 kiddos and they were pretty easy. We are staying home, so I’ll plan to cook a nice dinner and that will be our Christmas celebration. I am doing some baking for some of my friends, but I’ll enjoy that and I can plan the timing to make it fairly easy on me.

Today DH had his pre-op physical with our PCP and tomorrow I have an appointment with my retina specialist. On Thursday he has to go back to the sleep clinic for another overnight sleep study to figure out what pressure setting he needs, then next Monday he will see the sleep doctor. At that point, if a CPAP machine isn’t prescribed, I’m throwing in the towel!

I got all your extra Christmas chores. It seemed to be never ending this year! Lucky recipients of your baking. I hope all your doctor appointments go well!