The goal is the South Pacific, but first we’re going to stop for a few days in Hawai’i. And if you were going from Michigan to Hawai’i and had a brother in San Francisco, wouldn’t you stop for a few days to break up the trip? Especially if you had something approaching unlimited time (ignoring for the moment existential thoughts about ultimate mortality)? I thought so.

We stayed downtown at the St. Francis, a classic San Francisco landmark, and spent our two days while Mark’s brother John and his wife Alma were working exploring a couple museums. Our first full day we were going to tour the Museum of Modern Art, recently reopened after a three-year renovation, and after confirming online that it opened at 10:00 AM we headed there after breakfast. To our dismay, the museum was closed on Wednesdays, starting that day, explaining why Google didn’t know it yet.

Plan B, then, was to head out to the Legion of Honor, a European art museum built in honor of the fallen soldiers of World War I. It was a six-mile walk out there, pretty much across the entire city from east to west, all in new hiking shoes we’d both just bought. Perhaps not be the smartest thing we’ve ever done but it worked out alright. The walk itself wasn’t that interesting, taking us through kind of boring neighborhoods, but when we got close to the museum we were in beautiful Land’s End Park with great views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the entrance to the San Francisco Bay.

The museum was good, but the modern art museum the next day was spectacular. At $25 each it was the most expensive museum we’ve gone to but it was worth every penny. A huge collection all well presented in a way that you could really learn something about art over the last century. To top it off the museum has a free app available with absolutely great descriptions of probably a couple hundred highlights throughout the seven floors of exhibits. Each entry was interesting, informative, and – crucially – short, rarely exceeding two minutes. There were different people describing the art so it never got too routine. Simply the best museum we’ve been to in our multi-year travels. If you’re ever in San Francisco don’t miss it, even if you think modern art is kind of stupid.

And then we got to spend a little time with John & Alma. One night the four of us went to Al’s Place, what John describes as his new favorite restaurant. We could see why he thinks so highly of it; the food was amazing. Of course, we learned during the meal that it has a Michelin star, so it makes sense it would be somewhere on the “spectacular” spectrum. The next night Alma had an event at Ava’s school, so while she was being a good Mom we went with John, Ava, and Nico to a Wild Sushi, a great little place in their Sunset District neighborhood where we were the only English speakers in our section of the restaurant. That’s always a good sign.

That was the end of our quick trip through the U.S. mainland. From here it’s off to Honolulu for three days – again, largely just to break up the long trip – and then to American Samoa and the South Pacific. We’ve had it with all the ease of hanging out in the States; it’s time for some adventure!

From here on out it’s all art, first from the Legion of Honor, where there was a big Rodin collection to start with.

Now it’s art from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Next stop on our quick visit through the States was LaSalle, Michigan, to see Mark’s parents. I won’t say that we intentionally timed the visit to coincide with Michigan’s tomato season, but we’re awfully glad it worked out that way. As we travel around the world we are increasingly convinced that the best tomatoes in the world are from southeastern Michigan. Seriously, we never have truly great tomatoes unless we’re in Michigan.

Oh, and we visited with Mark’s parents, too. There tends to be less time between visits with them than with the rest of our families – they joined us in Guatemala last February, and we’ll spend two weeks in New Zealand with them in November – but time hanging around the house in Michigan is great. Happy hour, where you can count on good quality cocktails at a decent price, is something we look forward to. Given our weird lifestyle, we don’t get a lot of home-cooked meals, so the smoked pork chops, smoked turkey, and steak tartare were a welcome change.

Wait – steak tartare? Yup. We go through a bit of withdrawal when we leave France, where one or the other of us has steak tartare most every day. We’d had kibbeh nayyeh (Lebanese raw lamb) for lunch, but that’s just not enough raw meat for one day. So Mark’s dad made it for us on our last night. Wow – every bit as good as anything we’d get in Paris and all washed down with a French rosé we’d managed to bring back from the Loire valley. Seriously good stuff. See?

Meanwhile, the saga of my lost luggage on the flight from Paris to Minneapolis continues. They returned the bag while we were up at Lake Vermilion so now the challenge is to get reimbursement for my “necessary expenses” during the six days the bag was flying around North America. Delta has an online form that … how do you describe it? … doesn’t work. You start entering the information and at some random and indeterminate point the form stops capturing the info you enter. It allows you to enter it, and it shows up on the screen but, as I discovered when I was done, most of it isn’t saved when you are ready to submit it.

So I called the Support line and was told by three different people that this was a known problem and I needed to submit multiple forms. OK, I complete one document with the 10 items it seems to accept and start to fill out a second form. This time, though, when I enter my personal information, instead of getting the option to start entering the remaining items I had bought, the form says “Reimbursement claim successfully completed.” As in “Idiot, you’ve already submitted your reimbursement form and we aren’t going to let you submit another!”

So now I have a partial claim filed that they think is my complete file and I’m going to have to go through another round of talking with random people at a call center. All this because they lost my bag on a nonstop flight. Did I mention that I hate Delta?

As I said, the stop in Michigan was brief. We did a day of errands in Ann Arbor, including a brief tour of Mark’s old college stomping grounds, getting ready to head off to the remote South Pacific. First, though, it’s off to San Francisco and Hawai’i.

Back in 2001 my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary and, after a big party to celebrate, the family – parents, siblings, spouses and partners, grandkids – went to an island in Lake Superior for a week-long reunion. Given that the family at the time was spread from the Boston through the Midwest, out to California and up to Alaska, the opportunity to reconnect was delightful. Five years later we returned and then in 2011 we went to a lodge on Lake Vermilion, a huge lake in Northern Minnesota, instead. Now 2016 was time for our fourth reunion.

The family has changed a lot, of course. Three new grandkids. Eleven new great-grandchildren. A couple in-laws left the scene. Sadly, my Dad died just a couple months ago, and we missed him a lot this week. My mom is on the long slide of Alzheimer’s, which makes the time we get with her now that much more precious. And for this reunion the Alaska side of the family – my brother and his wife, along with his son, daughter-in-law, and their nine (!) children – couldn’t make it down.

Still, there was a lot to celebrate. It’s easy for me to imagine that as I grow older and more geographically distant from my siblings I would grow, well, more distant. It’s not happening, perhaps in measurable chance because of these reunions. In fact, it’s just the opposite; I enjoy them – enjoy, respect, and appreciate them – more than ever these days. Particularly when we’re all spread so far away there is just no substitute for a long week, lazy, relaxed. No agenda, just hanging out cooking, eating, cleaning. Drinking. The funny story there is that although we range from mid-forties to early sixties, we still have to hide our drinking from my mother. (Alcohol doesn’t mix well with her Alzheimer’s so we keep it away from her.)

Time with our several nieces and nephews is lots of fun, too. Jackson was an infant when we first did this in 2001; now he’s got his driver’s license learners permit. Kevin was a young teenager back then and now he’s in a PhD program. Little Dexter wasn’t a gleam in anyone’s eye in 2001 and now he’s a cancer survivor. No one had blue hair then but Mat does now.

What’s it like for a week in the great Northland? Loons calling across the lake at night. Several bald eagles flying overhead, sometimes close enough that you could hear their wings in the wind. A mild case of northern lights one night. The most luminous rainbow any of us have ever seen. Ever. My brother Vic and brother-in-law Lonnie did most of the cooking, ensuring that we would eat really, really well. Fabulous northern Minnesota weather through most of the week.

This once-every-five-year reunion was the proximate cause of our return to the States, but with my mother’s health declining we may have to push the next one up a few years. I will consider myself a lucky man if the next one is as good and comforting as this one was.

From here we’re making a couple more brief stops – Michigan and San Francisco on the mainland, then Hawai’i – before landing in the South Pacific in a couple weeks. So far I’m really enjoying the visit home, but already we’re getting itchy to start exploring new parts of the world.