Kevin Warnock

A lot has happened since I last wrote here more than half a decade ago.

My wife and I had a son. My wife graduated from community college and then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. She will graduate this year. Our daughter is in first grade and is thriving. Her extracurriculars include ballet, ice skating, parkour, guitar, piano, software development and acting. Our son is taking ballet, music and ice skating classes.

My dear parents Martha and Robert passed away. I miss them. They both met our son, thankfully.

I retired in February, 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was too risky to continue as an innkeeper at my home. It was a fun and wild ride. Between 2014 and 2020 I hosted over six-thousand travelers from seventy-four countries. Most of these travelers I found through Airbnb, but some were through couchsurfing.org. I credit my current marriage to being an innkeeper. I didn’t meet my wife as a host, but after we met she did end up staying at my home, and she never left. We’ve been together over a decade now. It’s been a magical decade… the best decade of my life.

Our daughter is vivacious and outgoing. She met and lived with two-thousand guests before I retired. Starting when she was only seventeen months old, she would shake hands with every guest at the front door, even if eight guests arrived at once. She would push their luggage to their room or rooms, even though the height of their luggage often exceeded her height. Now that she’s older, my wife sometimes takes her to conferences, and our daughter charms the attendees. Would this be the case without my time as an Innkeeper?

During summer break in 2023 my wife was an intern at a software company in Stockholm, Sweden, as part of a study abroad program arranged by her university. I didn’t want to stay in one place for the summer, even though Stockholm is an amazing city. So, after getting my wife settled into her apartment, I rented a car and took the kids on an eight thousand mile road trip. We only encountered one other individual parent traveling with children, and his kids were much older than one and five years old.

We drove from Stockholm and took a ferry to Denmark. From Denmark we took a ferry to Germany. Then we drove to Poland. Then back to Germany and onto Austria.

We were stopped by the police as we entered Austria. The very young officers checked our passports and sent us on our way. The hotel clerk that night said we were stopped for our Swedish license plate. We never saw any Swedish plates once we left Denmark, so I can see the officer’s concern. We didn’t receive a citation as I was very careful to drive at the speed limit, as there are speed cameras on many roads in Europe, and I drive the speed limit in the rest of the world too. The way the police pull you over in Austria is they drive in front of you and display a text message to you on a rear facing roof mounted illuminated sign. The message rotates through multiple languages, including English. It said “Please follow me.” Even though I saw it I could not believe they meant for me to actually follow them. So, I ignored it. The Police maneuvered alongside my car and the second officer opened their window and flashed their badge and motioned for me to follow them. I did. They spoke English well and never inquired why I had two young children with me or asked where their mother was. It was a brief encounter, but they did take our passports to their car for a few minutes, presumably to run in their computer. The hotel clerk said they get many reports from guests of the police stopping them at the border too.

It was late and the restaurants were closed. We stopped at a food truck that didn’t accept cards for payment. I didn’t carry cash as it’s not needed these days in Europe. We were about to go hungry, but a nice American couple in line stepped in and paid for dinner for all of us. They were from Palo Alto, California, just a short distance from my home in San Francisco. We had a nice talk. They were on an organized tour and were amazed I was just driving around Europe for months with two young children.

Next we went to Trieste, Italy, where my brother was born during one of our overseas adventures during my childhood. My father worked as a physicist in Yugoslavia at the time. He was paid in the local currency which was apparently difficult to spend in Italy, so we did our grocery shopping in Yugoslavia. My parents said the canned food didn’t have pictures and they could not read the labels, so we only discovered the contents at home when the cans were opened.

My brother and his family joined us in Trieste and we had a nice time seeing the city together. He had not been back since the year of his birth. I had been back in 2008.

Then we drove to Venice and met up with my brother’s family a second time.

After Italy, we went to France, Monaco, Spain, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands before heading back to Denmark and Sweden. We were on the road about two months. My wife flew to Spain to meet up with us in Barcelona and the surrounding area.

Once back in Sweden, I took the kids to Helsinki, Finland by car. I stopped along the way to visit a friend I hadn’t seen since we were both teenagers. We took a ferry to return to Sweden, saving days of driving. I wanted to drive to Finland because I wanted to experience the sun never setting.