Day 2 began in Rochester, Minnesota where I stayed at the Days Inn. Whatever. Next it was back to the Mississippi River at Lake City. The views there were pretty cool, but not so different really than the Hudson River. Until I looked up… Look, I get that for a lot of people in this country, bald eagles are just birds. But I’m from NEW JERSEY for God’s sake. It might as well have been pterodactyl. Supposedly there’s a bald…
So the first day of this trip is now behind me……..and so far, so good. Day 1 started with a relatively painless experience at EWR and then a pretty long layover in Chicago. The United Lounge at O’Hare was ehhhhhok. Apparently they’ve decided to follow Delta’s lead and offer up Mac ‘n Cheese plus soup. It just wasn’t as good as Delta’s offering in Atlanta. Anyway, who cares, right? United Lounges all suck and you should never pay to use them….
So this has been a pretty big year for us. Not only did we bring home a new dog member of the family……… But he’s going to be a big brother to our first child this coming January! Needless to say, as excited as we both are, our availability for travel – especially the type of travel we love best – is going to be dropping from complicated (with the responsibility of a dog) to essentially nonexistent (with a baby…toddler…family)….
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf, So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day Nothing gold can stay. Robert Frost
As I sit here at the Delta Lounge in Atlanta (which is AWESOME by the way), it dawns on me that it’s been four months almost to the day since we returned from our epic New Zealand/Middle Earth adventure. While our trip was only two weeks long, being away from home and seeing new things (not to mention the intense breaks from reality that were our travel days there and back again), where every day’s goal was to simply live…
Roll me on your frozen fields Break my bones to watch them heal Drowned me in your thirsty veins Where I’ll watch and I’ll wait, and pray for the rain Curl like smoke, and breathe again Down your throat, inside your ribs Through your spine, and every nerve Where I watch, and I wait And yield to the hurt And if you don’t believe the sun will rise Stand alone and greet the coming night In the last remaining light…
O! Wanderers in the shadowed land despair not! For though dark they stand, all woods there be must end at last, and see the open sun go past: the setting sun, the rising sun, the day’s end, or the day begun. For east or west all woods must fail… JRR Tolkien Sometimes on a journey (or life in general!), it can feel like you’re trapped in the middle of nowhere. But all woods come to an end, rivers all flow…
When winter first begins to bite and stones crack in the frosty night, when pools are black and trees are bare, ’tis evil in the Wild to fare. JRR Tolkien
So we got home late last night after an extraordinarily exhausting 53 hours of travel, including some borderline time travel that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Consider this, our flight left Auckland, NZ on Saturday at about 11:30 pm New Zealand time, crossing the international dateline shortly afterwards. We landed in California (after a 12 hour flight of nonstop turbulence) at 2:30 pm. On SATURDAY. That’s about nine hours BEFORE we departed. We went to sleep in…
They took the hobbits to Isengard. The question was, would we find WHERE they took the hobbits to Isengard from? Anytime I’m going off on the road, I like to take on some side quests. This comes from years of playing games like Fallout and Zelda and can range from simple things like finding the world’s biggest ball of twine (that’s in Cawker City Kansas, also near the geographical “center” of the lower 48 states) to more off-the-beaten path stuff…