Preparing to Travel
Today feels like we are in a curious sort of limbo. A taxi will arrive outside our house at 6am tomorrow morning to take us to the airport. From there we will fly to an island off the coast of Spain for a week largely spent “off the radar”. I packed my bag this morning – it took all of ten minutes. Given recent experiences travelling to and from Germany, I’ve become more adept than most at figuring out the difference between items I “must”, “should”, and “could” pack.
I’ve spent the last few hours charging phones and tablets for the children. Against all expectations, we managed to sneak five new iPhone contracts through over the last few days – meaning we can take advantage of the Apple Music family plan, and the kids an download and listen to whatever music they want going forwards – no more buying an ripping CDs for them. It also means they can download favourite albums to listen to without chewing through data.
(six or seven hours pass)
I have spent the entire afternoon and evening helping the children setup their iPhones. This is really code for “spent the entire afternoon and evening re-setting forgotten passwords for Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp”. It’s not funny any more. I still haven’t configured two factor authentication for the younger children, but they have strong passwords so I’m not too worried.
The conversation with Miss 14 – who had obviously changed her email password in a fit of temper 27 days ago (the account told me as much) – started out with “I didn’t do it”, and tailed off into “I didn’t know it would cause all this trouble”. All of her contacts were in Google Mail – and without that she had no phone contacts, no recovery email address, and nobody in WhatsApp. I think she finally learned her lesson today about listening, doing as she is told, and that we will ALWAYS find out what she has done eventually.
ANYWAY!
I need an early night. I need to be up at 5am in the morning, and somehow explode the children out of bed too. Wish me luck. Oh – and if WiFi at the hotel fails to transpire, I’m guessing this is me signing off for the next week or so (waves in a style reminiscent of the Truman show).