Our seven-day Scandinavian adventure: fly to Copenhagen, train to Malmo, overnight train to Stockholm, overnight ferry to Tallinn, ferry to Helsinki, fly back to London just an hour before our flight leaves for San Francisco. Whew!
After Sitchfest, John and Ben + Allie + Florence + Rosie + Eddie headed back home to Canada, but Joe + Sarah + Ethan + Hannah and our family headed to the Spanish island of Menorca for a little R+R, plus to sail Cousin Richard's boat, Cumulus.
One of the reasons for our UK trip was Sitchfest, a get-together for the four children, 10 grand-children, and more than 15 great-grandchildren, plus spouses and partners, of my grandparents Edward (Ted) and Helen. We had the meetup at the Harlow Rugby Club, the site of which is within a 15-mile radius of where Sitches have been documented to live for the last 400 years!
After braving the castles and beaches of North Wales, the ten of us (Ben, Allison, Florence, Rosie, and Eddie, plus Sara and me, Charlie, Miles, and Harriet) travelled to the very south east of England to stay with my cousins Jess and Zoe in Folkestone. My dad had already arrived and was staying with Zoe. My other brother Joe, his wife Sarah, and their kids Ethan and Hannah joined us a day later. Luckily we could all pack into Jess' place!
Ben and Allison, plus their kids Florence, Rosie, and Eddie, met Sara and me and our kids Charlie, Miles, and Harriet, in London and we took the train up to North Wales to stay with Aunt Jane, my mother's sister, on the farm where she and my mother were born (and where my mother is buried). We had a whole week together with nothing planned - perfect.
My immediate family are nomads: my brothers and I were born in England, grew up in Canada, and now live in Texas, California, and Ontario. The rest of the Sitch clan hasn't moved much in the last 400 years! Our aunts and uncles in the UK are still very close to where some of the earliest records of where Sitches (then called Sache's) once lived.
It's been a while since we've seen our UK relatives, so we planned a reunion! We may also have done some vacationing.
The Adafruit Gemma M0 is a quarter-sized microcontroller board with a 48 MHz 32-bit Cortex M0+ processor, 256 KB flash, 32 KB RAM. Most importantly it's $10!
The Adafruit LPD8806x48 is a flexible weatherproof strip of digitally-addressed (individually-controlled) LEDs with 7-bit precision on red, green, and blue.
There's no library for connecting them together, so I wrote some code to use the Gemma M0 integrated SPI hardware bus.
Our trip came to an end with a short hike in Monument Valley, a movie in Flagstaff, and a reminder of why Pheonix is a burning 120F hell-hole that should be avoided at all costs. What a wild ride!
Mesa Verde National Park is a collection of cliff dwellings from native americans who lives here thousands of years ago. We sniped tour spots two weeks earlier and Thursday we toured both the Cliff Palace and Balcony House. Friday we hiked another section of the rim trail to see petroglyphs carved into the rock walls, then drove into Monument Valley, a Navajo tribal park, for our last park outing of the trip!
We knew that two full weeks in an RV would be stressful, it's not a big space. Plus two full weeks of hiking would wear down the kids, and two full weeks of 100F heat would make anyone cranky. So we planned a vacation from our vacation - we got an AirBnB condo in Moab with seven beds, three showers, lots of air conditioning, a washer/dryer, and a pool!
