Taking Off #9: Status (Updated Again), January 2020

[As before, if you want to see a larger and more legible version of the chart, you can either (1) maximize your browser window, and then click on the version above; or (2) view a PDF version of it. Note that the latter is about 2.8 MB in size.]

Definitely a minor update today… If you’ve been following the excruciating intellectual saga to this point, you may remember that last weekend I posted an updated list of European cities we’re hoping to visit this year. That version of the list included a crucial refinement — it took into consideration:

• Each country’s membership in the Schengen club; and
• Our desire to be in the UK and Ireland both at the start of the trip, and during the month of August.

This brought us a little closer to something like a real itinerary, because it shows how we’d propose to jump into and out of the Schengen region during the allowed 180-day period, without overstaying the total of 90 days allowed in that window of time. The graphic depiction of this schedule included translucent indications of four distinct “calendar blocks,” as I think of them:

• A month-long stay in England only;
• A month-long stay in some of the mid- and the northern Schengen area;
• A two-month stay in the rest of the UK and Ireland (plus a visit to non-Schengen Bucharest at the end of that block); and
• A two-month stay in the remaining Schengen area.

(A fifth sorta-kinda vague block dangled at the end, in December; I assumed this to be up to a month back in the UK.)

It took me a few days to realize what bugged me about last weekend’s version of the schedule. To wit: the margins of the four main calendar blocks were sharply delineated, suggesting that we had some precise idea when each block began and ended. Which is rubbish; we don’t really know yet when even the first block starts, nor when the last one ends — let alone where and when we’ll be cavorting around in the middle. All we know for sure is that we must be out of our apartment by the end of May.

So, then, the very minor update: I’ve replaced those translucent-green blocks with translucent-green-gradient blocks: the blocks now sort of taper off from one to the other, with a bit of overlap to indicate the vagueness of the milestones.

One other interesting and perhaps less trivial bit this week… When I told The Missus about the New Improved Finer-Tuned Schedule, she expressed some worry. “There’s nothing to be done about it,” she said, “but I just worry that we’re going to be too cold at the end of the six months.” (This worry springs not just from The Missus’s origins, waaaaay south of the Mason-Dixon line, but also from our desire to pack for as narrow a climatic range as we can predict.)

So I’ve poked a bit more into the temperature data I’ve got, to come up with a projection of the average highs and lows we can expect during each calendar block — the highs from the earliest calendar month in each block, and the lows from the block’s ending month.

(This is the point at which you get to see my inner Database-Guy Obsessions-Compulsions exposed to embarrassing view.)

Here’s what I’ve got:

Cal Block	From-To	Avg Starting High	Avg Ending Low
1	Jun-Jun	67.8	52.8
2	Jul-Jul	75.8	57.7
3	Aug-Sep	69.5	51.2
4	Oct-Nov	67.9	44.8

…which isn’t perfect, to be honest: if perfect, there’d be a temperature spread of no more than 10-15 degrees between high and low for every block, and the temperature ranges from one block to another would more closely align. But it’s not bad. That one-month Block 2 is an outlier, obviously, but I’m certain we’d rather be a little too warm than a little too chilly in mid- and northern Europe.

Aside: back when I first dreamed up using a giant table of average city-by-city climate conditions to guide our schedule, I included not just these European cities but also a half-dozen cities in the eastern US, for comparison purposes: Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Atlanta, and Jacksonville. (As I said at the time I posted the first version, “This enables us to observe, for example, ‘In terms of its average weather, Bath in June resembles Philadelphia in October.'”) For what it’s worth, the range of average monthly highs to average monthly lows for those US cities, across the whole six-month period, is 84.8 degrees to 44.0 degrees.

At this point, I think I’ve about wrung all I can out of the data side of the decision-making process. What remains is most important: actually, like, making some decisions — especially nailing down at least an arrival date in London. I’ll try to keep this up-to-date as we move along… but at least you won’t have to look at rows and columns of data any longer!