Europe in Stats

Is it commercial suicide to take 7 weeks away from your business? I really don’t know – time will tell. I know I won’t regret the time I spent with my family and ailing mother. I’ve been in England, the Isle of Man and Spain since mid June, and it’s close to August now.

I’ve been spending time with the family and calibrating a few things – not really a self-science project, but I learned a few things on the way.

castle valencia
Monasteries how I like them – abandoned

Did I mention I hate the heat in Texas summers? I tried a little less hot in Southern Spain – before the hordes arrived – peaking at around 31 degrees C – 88F. Still a little toasty for me, so my natural rhythm was to take four hours in the middle of the day and spend it somewhere dark and cold, stuffing my face with chocolate filled bread products. 15 pounds heavier now, I’m ready for the all important “before” shot, with which I will sell my valuable weight loss eBook, or perhaps my herbal weight loss solution.

I’m sure there’s a human angle to the trip, but here are the stats:

  • Days spent with Number One Son: 46

  • Cars rented: 3 – named by NOS as Raz, Opel and Benny
  • Monorails used: 2
  • Train trips: 1
  • Tourist train trips: 3
  • Tourist sightseeing buses: 1
  • Taxis: 6
  • Planes flown on: 7
  • Ferries across the Mersey: 1
  • Dollars spent: many
  • Number of women in bikinis that NOS threw sand at: 14
  • Number of other people’s towels NOS trampled sandy footprints into: 7
  • Number of women in bikinis asking me to take photos of them: 3
  • Curries consumed: an astonishingly low 4
  • Sand castles built: approximately 32
  • Combined ages of all relatives visited: 656 years
  • Hours spent playing CSR Racing: 3 hours in garage, 20 hours on track (some of which was admittedly with the help of U.R.) CSR Racing is a more futile video game than most.
  • Best quarter mile time: 8.021s
  • Time taken to drink half a bottle of vodka: 4 hours

As part of my calibration exercise, I learned the limits for number of beers /coffees consumed to make the next day manageable (3 and 2 respectively). I also learned that above about 85F (30C) I’m pretty useless. So if I were to superimpose my Spanish siesta onto the Austin lifestyle, I’d hibernate from approximately 9am to 10pm each day, or from mid-April to mid-September.

Allegedly it takes about 4-6 weeks to inculcate a new habit. Which is dangerous to any productivity as my holiday habits involve eating as much chocolate based food as possible without my kids seeing, and drinking as much as I can without being too irritable. We’ll see.

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