Lots of travel news today!

We are planning a wine tasting trip to Sonoma in July, being joined by a friend we met on our Costa Rica/Panama cruise last year. I’ve reserved an AirBnB, which was a more complicated process than I expected – my password didn’t work, and my account was tied to a phone number I no longer have and a credit card whose expiration date had changed since the last time I logged into AirBnB. I spelunked through their site and finally found a number (800-234-2500) to call for help – a few minutes later, my account had been reset and I was able to make the booking. It’s a good thing my email hadn’t changed, too!

And the Tanzania extension for our hoped-for trip to Southern Africa this year got cancelled; we were offered an extension to Kenya, instead, which would probably have been even better, but that was just one uncertainty too many for us, so we declined the extension. We are still planning to take the rest of the trip, but still aren’t quite ready to buy airplane tickets.

The DeYoung Museum of Art in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco reopened at the end of February with a postponed blockbuster exhibit, “Calder-Picasso”. It seemed like a good idea to go see it once we were fully vaccinated, but I never got around to getting the tickets (we’re members, so the tickets are free).

This afternoon, we watched a webinar on the exhibit, presented by the Curator of American Art at the DeYoung. They showed a video he’d prepared…but it was very difficult to see the art! People asked about it in the Q&A, and the answer was “due to copyright considerations, we were limited in what we could show online”.

Sadly, there are only two weeks left in the show, and no tickets are available. And they’re not going to extend it because it’s going to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

We’re going to go to the Legion of Honor, instead, and see its special exhibit, Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave – it’s there until late August, but why take the chance?

It was Mother’s Day, and the yellow rose bush in our backyard was happy to join in the celebration.

 

It was also the first day this year that fresh wild local king salmon was available at the Farmers’ Market – naturally, we indulged.

This afternoon, we went to our first wine tasting in at least 419 days. It was a pickup party at Silver Mountain Vineyards, the first wine club we ever joined. Things were a little different, of course – everything was outside and we had to select a pre-designated flight of wines instead of bellying up to the bar at will. I took the Bordeaux flight and Diane had the French Sampler, which gave us six distinct wines to try.

 

The views from the deck were as good as ever.

 

They also provided us with a fruit and cheese box and some tastes of library wines, including a 1991 Merlot (pleasant, but definitely past its prime).

It was a nice way to spend Sunday.

This morning, we attended services at Shir Hadash. We had our typical group of participants, including regular attendees in South Carolina and Indiana. We, of course, were sitting on our couch.

This afternoon, we attended a house concert featuring Rod McDonald, playing from his house in Delray Beach, FL. The hosts were in Westchester County, New York, and the attendees were scattered across the country, chatting and applauding between songs as if we were in one room.

This evening, we took a walk and saw a neighbor mowing his lawn – his lawn mower, naturally, was electric and had headlights.

If you’d told me sixteen months ago that I’d be writing this today, I would have thought you were crazy. Well, maybe not about the lawnmower, but certainly about the other two things.

It will be wonderful to be able to be with people in person again, but I have to admit I’ll miss being able to “go places” without going anywhere.

Back in the late 1980s, I flew a lot and accumulated many frequent flyer miles. I never quite reached the point of taking a mileage run just to qualify for higher status the next year, but I was an avid reader of the copy of Frequent Flyer magazine that was included in our departmental subscription to the Official Airline Guide.

We were able to take advantage of those miles over the years to travel overseas for free and to upgrade almost at will.

But as the airlines gave us more and more ways to earn frequent flyer miles, they also made it harder and harder to redeem them – and they kept increasing the number of miles you needed for a trip. The glory days of getting 10 cents/mile ended a long time ago – these days, you’re lucky if you can get 2 cents/mile when you redeem, and even luckier if you can get a route that isn’t insane.

Today, we were lucky. We booked the Boston to San Jose leg of our upcoming trip on Delta and got better than 2 cents/mile in value. I didn’t have quite enough Delta miles to buy the tickets, but I was able to convert a few Amex points into Delta miles to close the gap.

Airline miles are a depreciating asset – the airlines can, and do, change the redemption rate any time they want, so it’s better to hold as few of them as possible – after today, I’m down to under 1000 Delta miles and under 100 United miles. Instead, I do most of my spending on cards that give me points that I can transfer to many different airlines or hotels, or even turn into gift cards or cash.

And these days, I use my Apple Card for most in-person purchases – it gives me back 2% in cash, which is easy to understand!