Making Landfall

 

Last week I knew we were officially in Florida when I saw this sign in Baldwin while waiting for a train to go by.  

Spelling phonetically isn’t always the best idea.

Minimal News

It's been a bit of a dry spell for the blog. I’ve been trying to make headway in book #3, so I must have used up all my cleverness there.

Call of the Road

And we're leaving why. . . . ?!

      

    The dog’s looking nervous, our meals are becoming stranger and stranger, and our clothing’s not much better.

Heebie Jeebies

Over the past week, Mamie’s gone from

Rollin' Home

It must be the effect of those two 12+ hour days in the car that it’s taken me this long to announce that we’re back from Florida.

Not-so-parallel universes

I knew that being in Florida would feel very different from slogging through the winter in Massachusetts. This weekend, though, I passed through so many alternate dimensions I might as well have been in an old episode of Star Trek.

Shaken

     Our son and delightful daughter-in-law are on their honeymoon, delayed a bit from their June wedding.

Collards and Sombreros

     On Saturday we waved goodbye to palm trees and alligators and began the hike up the East Coast to home.

Next Chapter

      The squirrels who have spent the year creating tiny craters all over the front yard have nothing on me.

Aftershocks

          I'm not the fan of the show that some people are, but the return from a distant land can leave me a dead ringer for a cast member of The Walking Dead.

On the last day of a long trip you pack, square your shoulders (or try to, since they’re bowed by your carry-on filled with souvenir olive oil, pottery, and beer steins) and face the Olympic event known as The Flight Home. 

First, however, you must pass the hurdles of bus to airport, plane to plane, time zone to time zone, and when you’re really little more than walking protoplasm, security line to customs line and yet again security line to customs line. And usually with access to a bathroom at unpredictable intervals at least five hours apart.

          Also, all this occurs with a six hour time difference, which means no matter how reasonable the hour of your flight, you will have been marching along for at least 22 hours straight. 

          On the long trek home some of my fellow travelers and I traded re-packing urban myths. There’s the person someone knew who packed old clothes with the plan to abandon them and buy a new, snazzy European wardrobe. Somehow I can’t see myself choosing my touring outfits from my Goodwill bag, and I wonder if that person in his high-water paint-stained cargo pants had any difficulty being admitted to the stores selling all those snazzy European numbers.

          Someone else swore they knew of a person who packed old underwear to be discarded as it was worn, and thus make room for that pottery and those beer steins. I’m no thong wearer, but that person must have possessed truly epic Granny panties to gain that much suitcase space by chucking her undies. 

          In the process of our bus to Budapest airport, and our plane to Munich, and our plane to Boston, we did discuss the possibility of missing suitcases. But lost luggage was the least of my worries.

          I’d been getting two days out of each pair of pants, and finding creative ways to shuffle my few tops. By the time I hit my front door, it was a toss up whether to do a wash or simply set fire to everything on the front lawn.

Eat Up!

     For our first day in Strasbourg, out of experience from past trips, we went into tourist survival mode.   Some of our past trips have been in a group with a determined guide and an ambitious agenda, and if we were going to get to whatever abbey or famous birthplace was on that agenda, meals could be delayed. 

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

     A black crow sat in the bare tree outside the bedroom window this morning and cawed its dark opinion of the world. Rain is spitting against the glass and the temperature is a grungy fifty-two degrees. And my perfectly balanced washer decided it would be hilarious to cha-cha this morning’s load of wash around the basement. 

 

 Not the most auspicious beginning for a Big Trip. 

At this rate, it makes me wonder if a tasseographist might find in my tea leaves the shape of a mountain (a signal of a journey marred by hindrance), or if a Babylonian haruspex (thank you, Google) would be likely to discover something hinky in the liver of that day’s unlucky sheep.

Still, I’m all packed, the timers are on the lamps, the neighbor’s picking up the mail, and the newspaper’s been stopped so I guess there’s no backing down now.

We’re off to Yurp, refugees and terrorists be darned. We’ll be floating down the Danube some of the time and hiking around over cobblestones the rest. If nothing else, judging by the stern requests for contact numbers, this trip has proven that my kids are officially adults and I need to stop thinking of them as perennially 12 years old with scrapes on their knees. 

 I’m not sure whether or not I should instruct you to watch this space. My blogging ability and/or motivation is hard to predict at this point. A lot will ride on a delicate balance between the availability of wine and Wi-Fi.

Delivery Adventures

          We've survived our latest adventure. Truth be told, our adventures are pretty tame most of the time, but they can run to events like delivering a chest of drawers to our daughter an hour and a half away in Boston in a blinding snowstorm, a storm so bad that all the rest stops on the Massachusetts Turnpike were closed. 

A place to lay my head

     You don’t usually hear people complaining about a lack of development in New Jersey, but we’ve found a small axe to grind on that subject. 

Home is where the laundry is

  

        We’re safely home from our vacation, although it is a bit hard to differentiate our vacation life from our retired life.

Nice of them to name an island after me . . . .

Yesterday we zipped over to Martha’s Vineyard.

Sand and Tchotchkes

Every year at this time we head out for a week at the Mecca of Massachusetts, Cape Cod.

Going Cold Turkey

Last fall we said a final goodbye to Satchel, our eighteen-year-old black cat. He was arguably one of our favorite pets, more of a dog in a cat suit than anything else. He was certainly the only cat we’d ever had who would play fetch. 

          We are now in unfamiliar territory – the land of the petless. Since my husband tends to stay rooted in his recliner, there is now no one to run to the door when I return home. My clothes are strangely fur-free, and the twin odors of cat litter and Friskies tuna no longer waft through the house. When I hear an odd noise I actually have to pay attention instead of dismissing it as my sixteen-pound cat thumping around upstairs. 

          Now when I visit friends with pets, they probably wonder why they’ve bothered to invite me at all since their animals get more attention than they do. Molly, the giant Newfoundland; Shultzie, the miniature dachsound; Blue, my son’s skittish cat – whoever they are – big or small – as long there’s fur, when I leave they’re a bit worse for the wear. Most rewarding of all are my daughter’s cats, Marvin and Dusty, who bear a strong resemblance to the cat in the Peanuts cartoon. They drape themselves over you like so much Spanish moss. 

          We had planned to swoop into the local animal shelter this spring and bring two more cats home to what is unquestionably Cat Heaven. However, we will likely be away for some of next year, beginning with a two to three-day road trip.

     I do recall seeing other cars with a cat stretched below the back

window dozing blissfully, but the more likely scenarios for us are an animal ricocheting around the vehicle like a furry icon in a video game and/or two people with clenched jaws, whose faces match their gray hair, the result of being trapped in a car with the unending complaints – and emissions – of an unhappy pet in a carrier. 

          So now I’m spending way too much time watching cat videos, I wait anxiously for news about Albert at Going Gently http://disasterfilm.blogspot.com/ (don't even get me started on Winnie), I melt at pictures of Eli at Henny Penny Lane http://hennypennylane.blogspot.com/, I look forward to what Chance is up to at Far Side of Fifty http://farsideoffifty.blogspot.com/ , and of course I've hit the motherload at Knatolee's World http://knatolee.blogspot.com/ , where she's apparently preparing to build an ark. 
        Meanwhile, the moles have turned the front lawn into their own personal Disneyworld, and the chipmunks in the yard are closing in, now that my mighty hunters are gone.

Day Trip

          My partner-in-crime and I headed off the other morning for a jaunt to an unfamiliar part of our state. She has a knack for discovering interesting places I would never think to visit, and that day was no exception. 

Take Me Out

Yesterday we ventured into enemy territory. Fortunately, we had reinforcements, some in civilian garb, the better to infiltrate our opponents’ ranks, others in full uniform.