After Seven Plus Years of Roaming, We Are Now Roosting in San Francisco!

Dear Family and Friends, thank you for following our travels for more than seven years through this blog. Today we are writing it from our house in San Francisco because we have moved back! This photo was taken on March 9th as we arrived with our car full of our travel gear and stuff from our storage pod, like our bikes.

Our long-time tenants had given notice and moved out in February. Our plan had been that if they ever gave notice, we would stop renting the house and move back in. We were staying near Lake Tahoe when we heard the news from our property manager. We had plans to make a short visit to the Bay Area before heading to Europe in mid-March. So we decided to have our pod delivered to the house so we could unload everything into the garage before heading off. Our pod was delivered on March 12th. 

We had our posessions in this pod for over seven years, visiting it periodically in Hayward to get stuff out and put other stuff away. As the pod was being unloaded, Kristina remarked that the container looked smaller than she remembered. What had we kept? We would soon find out!



Looking inside it appeared that we'd saved A LOT of stuff.



We put the boxes that had items we'd need right away, like an air mattress, in our downstairs.



We knew we had a bunch of work to do on the upstairs before we moved in, so the rest went into the garage.



We made use of the metal shelves in the garage and organized our boxes by where they would eventually go. Behind Pete are all our books, and he is piling up furniture in the middle.



As we were unloading and arranging our stuff, the novel coronavirus pandemic was spreading rapidly in Europe, especially in Madrid, which was one of our planned destinations. We were getting concerned, yet we still thought we could go. But when the US Center for Disease Control issued travel warnings and recommended only essential travel, we decided to cancel the trip. We felt disappointed, but also ready to try staying in one place for a while, and we felt really grateful to be back in our house. Anyways, we had over a hundred boxes to go through before we would be fully unpacked, so we had plenty to do.



As we became more informed about the global pandemic, it began to feel obvious that we needed to be here instead of traveling. It took us two days to empty the pod.



This is our dining and living room. In anticipation of having our upstairs floors refinished, we had our piano moved downstairs to our master bedroom.



One week after we arrived, the SF Public Health Department issued the order to 'shelter in place', to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and flatten the curve. When we heard about it, we raced off to the store to buy paint and supplies while they were still open. In our first home repair project Pete tore the cracked and peeling paint off one wall in our upstairs front bedroom.



Our house was built in about 1925 and it's Edwardian, which luckily for us is a lot less ornate than Victorian architecture. But we still needed to sand all the trim and doors, and patch all the cracks in the walls. Kristina's new favorite tool was the German-made Shop Vac, which attached to the sander and kept the dust to a minimum.

Here Kristina is in the upstairs back bedroom working on sanding the closet door. At her feet are the large paint chips that were coming off in sheets. We worked for about ten days before we were ready to start painting. In the evenings we read articles about COVID-19 and educated ourselves about how to do our part to 'flatten the curve'. We limited ourselves to just one trip to the grocery store each week.

One of our trim details is a picture rail (above), which can be used to hang pictures by wire rather than needing to put nails into the walls. Kristina was painting the second coat on the picture rail when Pete snapped this selfie. Slowly our house was starting to look good again, and we felt grateful that we were able to be here during the pandemic.



Pete had the idea to pose as American Gothic with a painting theme rather than a farming theme. We later learned from his sister Denise that the Getty was promoting the idea of recreating famous artworks to keep people entertained at home. Here's a link to some additional photos from a New York Times article.



In anticipation of our floors being refinished, we moved our 23-year-old refrigerator out to the back deck. The new fridge will arrive next week and this one will go to the dump.

We had ordered broadband within days of arriving back in San Francisco, but more than five weeks later we still don't have it. To keep us occupied while the floors were being refinished, we went on tandem rides around San Francisco. It's the 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park this year, and the Hall of Flowers had pretty blooming poppies out front.

And the cherry trees were blooming all over Golden Gate Park. Kristina must have known she needed to wear her pink hat and windbreaker this day.

We dropped by our friends Pat (right) and Sarah, who of course were sheltering in place in their lovely house in the Castro. We stayed more than six feet away, but we were able to catch up and socialize with them, which felt great and inspires us to drop in on other friends around the City in the coming weeks!

Another day we rode along the Embarcadero to Crissy Field and the Presidio. Notice Pete's wearing his Biciamo SF jersey! The silver lining of living through the pandemic is how nice the air quality and city streets are when they are not choked with cars.



We hope you are all safe and healthy.

Thanks for following our adventures through more than seven years of globe-trotting. We don't have plans to hit the road again, instead we're taking it one day a time, as the world feels so different now.