Last weekend, we took advantage of one of the newer airlines offering underserved route pairs to have my brother and sister-in-law fly nonstop to come stay with me. My parents also had already planned to be in North Carolina around the same time, so they extended their stay and drove farther east to join us. I expect that there was some advance coordination, but those logistics did mean both that everyone would be together for a few days and that I’d be saved a trip to the airport on Thursday afternoon.

Since it was my brother and sister-in-law’s first visit to the Triangle, we crammed in a lot of local restaurants: Dim sum; Peruvian chicken; local smashburgers; Persian ice cream; and a fancy new American place that I hadn’t had a reason to visit previously. We visited the farmer’s market on Saturday morning for breakfast pastries and I scrambled to find a coffee shop where Dad could get another cup. As I don’t drink coffee, that was harder than planning all of the various restaurants. It was definitely more driving than I usually do in the course of a weekend and that may have led to a warped perspective and/or disorientation as to where different places are relative to each other in the Triangle, but such costs must be paid sometimes for culinary exploration.

I worked more than I’d hoped on Friday (there was a closing after all and Bill didn’t return until Monday), so they went off and explored some on their own since they had another vehicle. This followed them joining me for an early lunch after they had spent the morning walking along the forested paths through the neighborhood. No one complained to me about the trip, so I’ll take that as a positive.

This week also marked the official closing of a chapter as I handed in my apartment key fob and garage access card at the conclusion of my lease. I’ve now fully moved into my new accommodation and have survived having five people here for ~72 hours. I don’t expect to have any more visitors for a little while, though I do hope to have more on average here than I did while I lived downtown. One of the big differences is that now I have a guest bedroom that doesn’t also double as my office.