Travels with a Flat Hat

After a relatively benign start to our journey to a new life over here in Europe, things unraveled a bit. We arrived at the airport and went to gather our luggage and despite the fact that we were told that we would have to go to another building to pick up Flynn we were pleasantly surprised to see him in his carrier at the bulky luggage area waiting patiently for us. When we went through customs the agent looked surprised to see that we had a live animal with us. I just asked, “okay?” and though his body language said otherwise, he replied, “okay” and we were through. After that bit of good fortune, we had a series of misadventures. First, we frantically searched for the track from which our train was supposed to depart and by the time we found it, it was long gone.  We checked in with the agents at the station, but since we had purchased the ticket online from an agent other the Deutsche Bahn, they could not assure us that the ticket we had was a flexible ticket. I was pretty sur...

 This blog got a late start, so let me briefly outline how we got started with the journey  After 6 years of retirement and our return to the United States and after traveling around the country we left 31 years before, we realized that in the words of Thomas Wolfe, “You Can’t Go Home Again” Not only had the mood changed, but, things seemed quite foreign. After all, Susi and I had lived more than half of our adult life in Europe and it had become our home. With that in mind, I started researching if there was a way for us to go back.  Our initial choices were Germany, England or Scotland. Susi pointed out that we had done Germany and it was time to do something different. That left England or Scotland. Once it was narrowed down to those destinations it was a simple overwhelmingly vote for Scotland, where we opted to spend most of our vacations.   The decision was easy, but getting the right to live here was challenging. My first path for getting information to do tha...