December 21, 2025

Kansas City, MO, USA

Sunday. Today is the shortest day of the year – the Winter Solstice. Sunrise here in Kansas City was 7:34 and Sunset was 17:00; 9 hours and 26 minutes of “daylight”. Interestingly, Antartica, whence we just came, will have twenty-four hours of daylight. Iceland, where we were last year, will have four hours and seven minutes of daylight today. Well from now the days up here in the northern hemisphere start to get longer.

It may or may not seem obvious, but there isn’t much going on today. Harry V & Grace are still recovering from their food poisoning. Rochelle has come down with the flu and is in bed. Oliver and I made a Target run for “snacks”. Then we went to Barns and Noble for a book, and somehow bought a $200 lego set for Harry V for Christmas.

We then walked across the street to get “a pair” of khaki pants for Oliver. Two pair of pants, one shirt and two sweaters later we walk out. Yes, another $500 Christmas present. You’re welcome.

I dropped off back at the house. Took a minute to print out the Kensington Jordan and Egypt itinerary and plane tickets. Had a cigar while reading most of them. Got back to the apartment and applied for our Egyptian eVias. Didn’t realize it until too late that it was a service site and not the Official Egyptian site. Cost three times as much but it is done. I’ll be more careful in the future.

Spent the afternoon and early evening trying to plan the flights for the summer. When you try and use airline mileage points, they seemingly always point you to the absolute worst possible flights. Either ones that start or end close to midnight, or start or end first thing in the morning, like 06:00. Somehow, there are never enough points.

United now has pooling of points, so maybe we call pool our points and get a decent flight. Have to wait 24 hours for the pooling to begin. By then they will have figured out a way to charge me more miles per flight.

We did give up on going to Newfoundland and Labrador. The tour was less than $8,000 for the 12 days. The cost of getting there and back from San Francisco was greater than the cost of the tour, and there were, again, no reasonable times on the flights. Landing in a place call Deer Lake in Newfoundland at 01:00 and then having to make it the 55 km to Corner Brook just didn’t make sense.

However, we are going just too and from Alan’s wedding now. San Francisco to Syracuse, New York and back. That does mean we’ll be in Sonoma the whole month of June. That’s actually ok. Ashland is still a go for July as well as Mary Vegas Trip. Then all of August and September in Sonoma/San Carlos before we leave for Spain in October.

Now looking at going to Kansas City for George and Oliver’s football game on September 18th, then going to Italy for the grape harvest in September, the Spain and Portugal October 7th to the 20th, back to Italy for two weeks, then off to Miami for the November 9th 23-day Amazon Cruise, the back to Italy on December 2. It is looking like Christmas 2026 will be in Italy with the whole family. WeLl stay in Italy until abot the 10th of January and then going directly to the Galápagos Cruise in January. At then end of January return to Italy and spend all of February in Italy. Then on March 2nd head out for the Bangkok to Tokyo Regent Cruise. Making it to Sonoma in April, before heading off to Harry V’s graduation in May.

2026-2027 looks like it will be plenty full even without the Canadian excursion.

For dinner we headed out to the Cheesecake Factory but when we got there it was a forty-five-to-sixty-minute wait. We walked over to PF Chang’s, and there were so many people waiting for a table we scratched that one as well. We headed back to the apartment and walked by Rye, where we had Grace’s graduation party. There were tables available.

Sunday is steak night at Rye and they had a special which included a salad, the steak, a side dish, baked potato in our case, and dessert, lemon meringue pie in our case. Mary got just a lettuce wedge. I got the special. We split the steak, baked potato and pie. My salad was just a house salad, but it tasted more like an onion salad. We swapped salads as a result.

The steak was fairly good. The potato was very good. Their interpretation of a lemon meringue pie was somewhat unique. The meringue tasted more like marshmallow fluff than meringue. Not bad, just not a traditional presentation.

After dinner more planning and thoughts about the future. 2027 will be our 75th year. We will probably hang up our travel hats, or at a minimum keep it to one trip a year. Oh, six months will probably be spent in Italy, but the rest will probably be spent in Sonoma. We are both starting to slow down a bit.

Buonanotte e ciao

Enrico e Maria