Some Photos......

I am a bit disappointed in my photos from the Pennsylvania/Virginia trip. Maybe it's because we were on the go, go, go so much and I didn't have time to properly "compose" them. (Truly, some of them were taken from the window of the bus. I mean the deluxe motor coach.) And as I typically do, I have mourned the shots I didn't get. I'm still mourning the fact that I did NOT photograph a tiny little girl from the trip Hubby and I took to Aruba in 2002. From this trip, I regret not getting a photograph of the CAMELS grazing on one of the Amish farms we drove by.

By the way, I am determined to go back to the Amish country of Pennsylvania and ride my bike. It just seems so appropriate.

Here is a sampling of some of the photographs. I won't bombard you with all of them in one sitting.

These guys were playing in the little square of an area called Kitchen Kettle in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Oh yeah, I had to buy magnets and a shot glass from THAT place. The square had lots of souvenir shops, craft shops, and restaurants.

I fell in love with the colorful farms that dotted the Pennsylvania countryside. You can tell an Amish farm from an "English" one because there are no lines going into the buildings.

The Amish horses are beautiful.

We were trying to put our faces in the cut-outs, and we asked a bystander to take our picture. She couldn't see what was showing on the screen, we couldn't stand on top of each other, and the camera wasn't close enough. Epic fail, I guess. I think Frogger Blogger (bottom right) looks like she's in that old Brady Bunch opening scene.

The Dutch Apple Theater, where we saw Fiddler on the Roof. Wonderful production, wonderful food, and excellent desserts. It's all about the desserts.

Not a very good picture because it was taken from inside the bus. I wish we had had more opportunities to get off the bus and take photos of the scenery.

An Amish buggy. They have been required to put reflectors, lights, and a reflective triangle on them to make them safer when driving at night. Many roads have extra paving outside the travel lane to help accommodate the Amish buggies. Still, I was nervous when our bus (I mean deluxe motor coach) passed close to them. If a buggy has a visor-looking attachment on the top of the front of the buggy (a spoiler, if you will), it indicates the buggy belongs to a minister, a bishop, or other officer of the church.

Amish push-cycles. Our tour guide explained that pedals would allow travel considerably farther from home, so Amish people have modified bicycles to push-cycles, which afford mobility but I suppose aren't ideal for long distances.

Some of the many, many gorgeous quilts for sale.

More photos to come. Thanks for accompanying me virtually!

PennsylvanianTrip Day 6......

Short post before I crash.

Long ride, but I made it to the game with plenty of time to spare. I was sooooooooooooo happy to see Hubby.

Good to be home to my bed. My coffee pot. My dog. My Hubby. My computer.

Pennsylvania Trip Day 1.......

Not a lot to write about tonight. We left about an hour late this morning because SOMEONE didn't check her itinerary closely enough and thought the departure time was later. (I don't know her, but she's not on my best friends list.)

The bus trip was actually pretty pleasant. We stopped often enough that we didn't get bored or crazy, but not so often that we felt we would never get here. I am by far the youngest person here, but that's to be expected in a group like this one. And it's okay with me.

We are in Harrisonburg, Virginia, our planned overnight stop on the way to Pennsylvania. This is at the limit of what the driver is allowed to drive in a day. He has a GPS device on the bus (excuse me, deluxe motor coach) that alerts his employer if he goes 5 mph over the posted speed limit. I love technology.

Katydid, Frogger (Not)Blogger and I walked back to the hotel from dinner, but I'm afraid I would have to walk all the way to Pennsylvania to make up for all I ate.

I guess I COULD have taken some photos on the bus (excuse me, deluxe motor coach) today, but I didn't. I hope to do a better job tomorrow.

Another Trip......

I'm leaving next Monday on another trip, and I hope to have a plethora of pictures to share. In fact, I bought a camera connection kit for my iPad (I'm not lugging the laptop, and I'll explain why in a moment) so I can upload pictures each day. I hope I hope I hope I hope. (My iPad is one of the first generation ones, so it doesn't have a camera.)

This trip is with my mother and both sisters. I know, I know, I hear you screaming "hypocrite" because I'm going on a trip with the same woman I've referred to as the She-Devil. (On her nickel, too.) Believe me, she's been called worse names. And she has earned every single one of them.

Example: At the company where she worked before starting her own business, they were putting a big fancy aquarium in their newly renovated lobby. Someone came up with the idea of buying a fish to match each employee's personality. There was a long pause, then someone said, "Where the hell are we going to get a barracuda for Carol that will fit in that tank?" So it's not just her children who think she's harsh and fearsome.

She has recently joined this traveling club at her bank, a group with whom she has made several trips. You can only be a member of this group if you have x number of dollars in your bank account. That goes against my grain (not to mention my bank account), but it's right up Mom's alley. To be fair (fairER?), Mom had a poor upbringing and a hard time with five kids and a worthless husband, even harder to feed all of us after the divorce. She got a whopping SIX DOLLARS a week for each child, and by golly that was still the amount my father was paying when I turned 18. He had started sending the checks to ME by that time, and he dutifully wrote a $24 check every month. No more, no less.

But I digress.

Mom enjoys traveling. Wait, let me restate that. Mom enjoys THINKING about traveling. She enjoys the looking forward to it, the planning it, the packing, the talking about it. She hates almost everything else about it. She once raised holy heck on a cruise ship because the LIBRARY WASN'T OPEN during its posted hours. She missed a connecting flight one other time (I thought it served her right for flying from Savannah to Atlanta to get on a plane to Tampa), and I was astounded when they didn't give her the entire airline as compensation.

Don't even get me started on the time she took Sweet Girl and my then-three-year-old nephew on a Disney cruise. She has such fond memories of that cruise, and both children were scarred for life. Sweet Girl called me crying about her Nanny's treatment of the youngster before they even got to the port.

Darn, I have digressed again. Back to THIS trip.

Even though a group is going on the trip, it can't be much fun to travel alone, so Mom talked Katydid into going with her. When Hubby and I were in Wisconsin, she called to see if I wanted to go too. I bit back my immediate response of, "Hell no," and said something almost worse, "But there's a football game that weekend." Then she told me that Frogger Blogger was going too, and I told her I would think about it. I couldn't let all three of them go off on a trip and not go myself! Besides, that would be an odd number, and it would make room assignments and seating assignments on the motor coach either difficult or crowded, so I agreed to go. Besides, I'm the one who is retired, and the other two had to use precious vacation days to make the trip.

And I AM looking forward to the trip, truly. I am grateful for the fact that I CAN go, and I'm appreciative of the fact that Mom insists on footing the bill for all of us. I'm NOT excited about riding on a bus for two days. The last time I was on a motor coach, I accompanied Sweet Girl's high school band to New York City for them to perform in Carnegie Hall. (Very cool experience.) I left a voice mail for Hubby somewhere in New Jersey along the lines of, "Just so you know, Hell is not a place. It's a bus ride." And they were good kids, truly. That's just a lot more sitting than I can handle.

This trip is to the Pennsylvania Amish Country and Williamsburg, Virginia. We are leaving early Monday morning from the bank, a little less than two hours from my house. We are going to see a dinner theater production of Fiddler on the Roof and a production of Jonah, with which I am not familiar. We are going to tour Amish farmlands and have dinner with an Amish family. (Please, please, please, please Mother, don't find fault with anything. Please.) Then we are going to my personal favorite, Hershey World. They can just leave me there. We tour Williamsburg the next day, and then make the trek home on the motor coach. When we get back at 6:00 PM on Saturday (Mom's 80th birthday), I will jump in my car and drive very fast (but not breaking the speed limit -  much) to the aforementioned football game. I probably won't make the 7:30 PM kickoff, but Hubby will be there already and I shouldn't miss too much of the game.

I just happened to have a picture of an Amish buggy handy. Sure it's a Wisconsin Amish buggy, but it fits the topic. Sort of.

Because we are traveling on a motor coach, luggage space is naturally limited. I don't like having a bunch of luggage ANYWAY, particularly when there is more than one hotel involved. Hence the reason I'm going to have to depend on my iPad instead of my laptop. It's not that bad, but it's a pain to use HTML code when I'm blogging. On a positive note, you won't have to read any lengthy posts like this one all next week. Score! I'm going to take a shoulder bag slightly larger than my usual purse that will hold my camera, iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Nintendo DS. (I've got to have a variety of things to do on the bus ride, but I'll mainly read.)

I think it will be an exciting adventure. And we'll see how this one goes before I make a decision about accompanying Mom to Australia in April. Fifteen days...holy smokes.

Packing.... Unpacking.... Repacking.....

Sweet Girl was astounded when I told her on the phone yesterday that I was packing for a trip that isn't until next week. She ought to know by now, that's how I roll. In a reversal of my usual procedure, however, I haven't packed for Hubby yet. (Yes, I still do that, please don't crucify me. You can't ever go back, you can't ever go back, you can't ever go back.)

I would be a little better at packing for trips if I would give in to my OCD tendencies. If I would write out a plan for the week, schedule when I'm going to wear what, and pack accordingly, I could save myself a lot of trouble. Not to mention avoid having one of us get a hernia from trying to lift my suitcase. (It's the big one.) I was completely packed by dinner time last night. But the thought kept nagging me that I had overpacked (as usual), and I didn't need all that stuff. I tend to be a "what if" traveler.

What if I want to walk laps around the ship's walking track?
What if I spill something on an outfit?
What if I don't FEEL like wearing the green dress Sweet Girl talked me into buying?
What if I eat so much in the first two days that nothing fits?

After dinner, I had another "what if" moment:

WHAT IF I didn't take all those clothes?
WHAT IF I had to wear something twice?
WHAT IF I wanted to wear something and didn't have it with me?

No. Big. Deal.

We are going on a cruise, and I knew I would need two "formal" outfits (unless we decide to avoid the hoopla of the formal nights, which we have been known to do). I went shopping with the express purpose of buying some casual dresses (even though I'm not usually a dress kind of girl), short cotton things that I could wear to dinner, then wear into town the next day or wear around the ship on the days at sea when the most strenuous thing we do is typically go to trivia and hope to kick some arses.

When we go to dinner on the ship, we typically go back to our room, get back into casual clothes, and sit on the balcony and watch the water go by. OCCASIONALLY we go to a show (we saw a wonderful magician/hypnotist on one of our cruises, and RARELY I can talk Hubby into going to a song-and-dance show. Sometimes we wear our dinner clothes for a grand total of two hours, and that's only because they drag out the dinner process until Hubby develops a twitch somewhere.

Sorry, I didn't mean to get so long-winded. I didn't want to scandalize anyone who might find the idea of wearing something two days in a row repulsive. Please don't look in my living room window the rest of this week.

Here is my suitcase as it was last night. It's a little misleading, because it WAS possible to zip it closed at that time, even though it doesn't look like it. I still had my swimsuits to put in, though, so I left it open.

This is a picture of all the clothes I took out of the suitcase. You probably can't tell (and I didn't take individual photos), but I have THREE formal outfits, FOUR short dresses, ONE skirt/blouse outfit, TWO skort/blouse combinations, and FIVE shorts/blouse outfits. Good. Grief.

This is after I have removed the extraneous outfits. And I still have enough clothes to wear, with room for spillages and the occasional "I'm-not-feeling-that-outfit" spells. Yo will notice I did NOT remove any of the shoes. A girl has to have her standards. You may also note that I did not include my unmentionables in any of these photos. You're welcome.

This is the suitcase after everything is neatly packed back in it.

And it zipped with ease.

 Maybe this is the process I need to go through EVERY time I pack for a trip.

Except when we travel in the RV. Having a closet along instead of a suitcase is a definite advantage.

Retirement So Far......

I'm not sure I consider myself officially "retired" yet. I would have had the summer off anyway, so these lazy hazy crazy days of summer would have been pretty much the same.

Except mentally.

I was telling Hubby today how in the past, even though I was off during the summer, I felt this sense of urgency to get tasks done (because one can only clean out the closets, dust the ceiling fans, go through clothes to give to goodwill, match CDs up with their cases in the summer time). If I took a day just to relax and do whatever I wanted to, I felt kind of guilty. I knew those days were limited, and for every one of THOSE I took, I was stealing a day in which I could actually get something accomplished.

I think it's those years of being task-oriented. Having deadlines. Maybe I'm better with deadlines; I don't know.

I do find myself in a bit of a time crunch of sorts, taking mother-in-law to multiple doctor's appointments and trying to schedule HER surgery around two of OUR trips because her own daughter is so unreliable. I also need to be out of town in South Carolina at least twice for a task that I will expound upon later when I can document it with photos and am not afraid I will jinx things. How's that for a teaser?

Hubby and I planned a cruise at the last minute, which is not typically how we do things. We plan for at least a year in advance and pay for the cruise a little each month in advance so the total cost isn't such a shock when we get back from the trip. It sounds corny, but it works for us. I had this vision of retirement in which we could plan something at the last minute and it wouldn't matter at all when we did it, because we would have no work schedules to worry about.

I forgot about football season. And bicycle rides. (And darn it, when I scheduled the cruise I forgot about one of my favorite rides, the Wilson 100, and we won't be back in time. Oh well.) There will also be a couple of golf trips we need to work around, and as soon as football season ends it will be time for gymnastics, and of course we have to work around those weekends as well.

It's sort of like working, only our schedules have to match up with stuff that's fun.

So far I'm really liking retirement.

In our future plans: an RV trip to see the Grand Canyon and as much of the western part of the country as Hubby will allow before he insists we head back home; a Mediterranean cruise - Hubby has always wanted to visit Rome, and I didn't get that far south when Sweet Girl and I went to Italy; a train trip to New Orleans (which I may schedule to coincide with an out-of-town gymnastics meet - surely he can stand ONE meet in the whole season?); an Alaskan cruise; visiting Hawai'i, preferably by cruise.

It's a good thing I retired at an early age. Otherwise I might not live long enough to get all these tasks completed.

Maybe Later.......

I said I would write about my favorite casino games tonight, but I'm honestly just too tired. We didn't win a bunch of money (yet), but we're not broke (yet) either, we are just so damn tired. I don't know what it is. We didn't stay up late last night, we slept until our regular time this morning, and we are both just exhausted. I'm not this tired after a 50-mile bike ride! Hubby is already snoring, and I'm going to attempt to read some of my book, but it doesn't look too promising. My eyelids are already drooping. This traveling business is hard work.

Sorry for the lame post.

I Need a Vaccination........

Or is it a vaccine?

Anyway, I need a shot. And not of tequila. Wait....what? That's an option?

I am suffering from grumpitis. I am so grumpy that I almost can't stand MYSELF, and I certainly don't know how the folks around me are standing me. I'm not exactly sure what initiated this grumpiness, but there are several candidates:

• Hubby and I are leaving tomorrow for another trip, and this time we are going by airplane. It's a trip to a casino we haven't been to before, and while I'm not OPPOSED to the trip ..... I wouldn't have CHOSEN it. I love to fly, but the confirmation we received has me a little worried. It's one of those $199/person deals that includes airfare and hotel rooms at the casino. The card we got in the mail said to report NEXT TO the British Airways desk. Next to? What kind of airline is this, that it doesn't even have its own name? If I'm wrong and Hubby has secretly booked us a trip to England, I will apologize publicly and never be grumpy again. Or at least not for a long time. Or for the weekend. 
• Because of the trip, today was sort of my last day off for the summer. And I spent it ..... at school. Our furniture was just delivered yesterday, so I spent today unpacking boxes and attempting to set up my room. I'm glad I went and got a jump on things, especially when there weren't too many other people around. It's just not how I would have chosen to spend my last day off. Next week is pre-planning, but I may or not be there because of.....
• Impending Grand Jury duty. I don't mind doing my civic duty, really I don't. I've never served on a jury before, either a traverse jury or a grand jury, so I figure it's about time I acted like a responsible citizen. I think it's the uncertainty of it all. I don't know the procedures, I don't know the process, I don't know what to expect, and I don't know how long I might have to report for jury duty. 
• It looks like my idea to purchase the cottage at the marsh isn't going to come to fruition after all. I wasn't turned down for financing, but the bank wants me to make a down payment of 10%, and that will eat up all my savings. I've been trying all year to build my savings up, and while I think the cottage is a good investment, I can't stand the feeling of being broke. I went into this saying that if it didn't happen then it wasn't meant to be, but it's easier to SAY that than it is to BELIEVE it.
• My blood pressure has dropped precipitously in the last few days, and it makes me feel out of sorts. I don't want to start adjusting my medicine, especially considering the fact that we will be out of town for three days, and without my doctor's knowledge and permission. I thought the drop yesterday was associated with doing a tough bike ride and allowing myself to get a little dehydrated. (Ironic, isn't it, that you are more likely to become dehydrated when you ride in the rain?) But it has continued to be low today. As in only double digits on the top AND the bottom. Weird.
• I've been having a little trouble sleeping. It may be related to any combination of the above items. Perhaps a glass of wine will help. Worth a try.

Off to generate some happy thoughts.....

What a Relief.......

Temperatures here in the sweltering South have been much milder these past two days, with highs in the 80's as opposed to the 90's. It was raining both this morning and yesterday morning when we got up, and we desperately need the rain. Yesterday it finally quit raining, but it stayed overcast for most of the day. It was a PERFECT day for riding my bike in the summertime.

So I sat inside and watched the British Open (which isn't really called the British Open anymore, but the Open Championship, which I think sounds pretty pretentious, but hey.... it's England!) and crocheted all day. I finished the baby afghan for Sweet Girl's friend, and I just realized I packed it and mailed it without so much as taking a picture of it. Arrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!! I have since started working on some placemats that I intend to put in the auction at our family reunion next year. Somebody better buy them.... I don't like the colors.

Today I ran a bazillion errands, mostly related to the RV trip to the beach (we're leaving tomorrow morning). When I got home, I told myself I couldn't possibly let two perfect riding days go to waste, so I called a halt to the errands and went for a bike ride. It was only 26 miles, but it beat sitting in the house. I rode some of my usual routes, then wandered around streets of town that I haven't ridden on before, and I wound up at the golf course so I could ride home with Hubby.

I'm excited about the trip, but not the seven-hour drive.

Doors were Not My Friends.....

Back when Sweet Girl was just a young 'un, she and I went to Italy to see my niece and her then-husband, who was in the Army and stationed there. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I am grateful that we had the chance to go. We went up into Germany and camped at an army post there, stopping in Innsbruck along the way.

[Side note: In a parent-teacher conference that fall, Sweet Girl's teacher, fairly new to the profession, smiled at me sympathetically and said, "Sweet Girl told her little classmates that she went to Italy this summer." She was more than a little embarrassed when I confirmed the "tale" as true.]

There are a gazillion things about that trip I can write about, even today. Watching my niece's husband almost arrest someone. The city we built out of tarps on our rainy camping trip. The Austrian people staring at the stupid Americans who were wearing shorts and t-shirts on a rainy July day when temperatures were somewhere in the 40's. [We couldn't help it. It was SUMMER when we left Italy that morning!]

What I often remember when I think about that trip, however, are the three occasions on which I became trapped.

My niece and her husband lived in army housing for married folks. They didn't have children at the time, so Sweet Girl and I stayed in their spare bedroom. The first morning I woke up there, I had no idea what time it was. I didn't have my watch, it was before the days of the cellphone-attached-to-one's-hip, and the bedroom didn't have a clock in it. I had no idea if it were a decent hour to get up or not, but I desperately needed to go to the bathroom. I went to the door and tried to open it quietly.

The doorknob came off in my hand.

I had a dilemma. Because I didn't know what time it was, I didn't want to shout and wake anyone up. If I ignored my bladder and went back to bed, I knew my niece wouldn't wake us up because of the long flight and the time difference.

Because I had a young child on a transatlantic voyage, I had plenty of writing/drawing supplies in our luggage. I found a piece of paper and a crayon and wrote something about being trapped in that room. There was a huge fan blowing in the hall, so I couldn't just slip the note under the door without it being blown away. I found some quarters in my purse and used them as weights, then I slid the whole contraption under the door. I didn't have to worry about knowing if my niece had found it or not - in just a little while I heard her burst out laughing, and she came to rescue me. I don't think I closed that door again for the rest of our stay.

We took the train down to Pisa and Florence. Because Sweet Girl wasn't old enough to appreciate culture and the museums and my niece had already seen them, they went to the beach while my niece's husband and I went on to Florence. When we got there, for some reason we couldn't open the door of the train. We could open the one on the OTHER side, but the jump was about six feet. And we would have been on the wrong side of the tracks. Literally. A conductor finally came and rescued us, and I realize this story has nowhere near the flavor of the first one. Sorry about that.

In one of the museums, I went to the restroom. It was a unisex facility, and amazingly enough there wasn't a line for it. I went in and did what one normally does in a restroom, and I started out. The door wouldn't open. I turned it to the right. It wouldn't budge. I turned it to the left. Same result. Back and forth. Back and forth. The walls began to close in on me, and that restroom was suddenly a very small, dimly lit, airless place. I began to panic, sweat pouring down my back. Click. Click. I'm trapped in a bathroom in a museum in Florence in Italy in Europe. Click. Click. I knew only two words in Italian, "ciao" and "birra." Neither one of them would help me get sprung from a bathroom.

Finally I heard a voice speaking through the door, the familiar voice of my niece's husband.

"Turn it to the left," he said.

"I did!"

"Turn it to the left AGAIN."

Oh. I didn't realize that was how their doors locked. Turn it once to close it; turn it further in the same direction to lock it. Or double lock it. Or something.

My relief turned to humiliation when I walked out of the bathroom and discovered that NOW there WAS a line for that bathroom. Every single one of them waiting for me to be rescued. They may have applauded when I walked out, I'm not sure. I just know I wanted to crawl under the Statue of David and die.

Never mind a language barrier. I couldn't even handle the doors.

The Nightmare that is Airport Security......

Let me go on record here by saying that I believe fervently in the necessity for heightened airport security. Thanks to the damn terrorists and the alarming number of psychotic people out there, the variety of ways in which travelers can be harmed has grown exponentially. Not to mention the fact that they are assisted by well-meaning news reports illustrating the latest and greatest means of terrorizing air travelers. I can just picture a terrorist with the remote control in his (because they are all men, you know) hand, surfing the channels and landing on CNN. He listens for a moment while the cheery anchor lists the different ways terror can be accomplished on an airplane, and he says to himself, "Huh. Hadn't thought of THAT one."

That being said, I think airport security procedures fall into two distinct categories.

Category 1: Overly vigilant but sadly necessary.

Category 2: Ridiculous and logic-defying.

I got to experience both on an up-close and personal level yesterday on our flight back from Jamaica.

Apparently I fail miserably at choosing winning lottery numbers, but my passport number has some secret code embedded which says I must be pulled out of the line AS WE ARE BOARDING THE AIRCRAFT, having already passed safely through security, and subjected to additional screening.

I didn't complain. I just said jokingly to Hubby as he went on his merry way, "Save me a seat." I suffered silently the additional pat down. A thorough pat down. I thought I was through, but they also had to search both bags I was carrying. The nice lady (and she was VERY nice, as was every single person we met in Jamaica) took every. single. item. out of my laptop case. Have I mentioned how much crap I carry in there? Nintendo DS, GPS for the bicycle, headphones, MP3 player, and several flash drives, along with every conceivable cord known to man for charging all of the above. I had to remove the laptop from the case and OPEN IT. I seriously thought I was going to have to boot it up and show her my wallpaper. (Imagine how embarrassing THAT would have been, since my computer wallpaper sports NOT a picture of my own offspring, but a picture of a member of the UGA gymnastics team. I can't help it - it is an awesome picture of her sitting on her haunches as she waited to mount the bars, and I took it myself from a significant distance.)

Where was I?

Oh yeah. The additional security screening.

There was a kid behind me (looked like a high school student but was wearing several pieces of clothing with the logo of the University of Iowa on them, and I realize that proves absolutely nothing) complaining about the indignity of the experience, since, according to his whiny voice, "Everyone else in my group just sailed right on through." He groused, "Why does this happen to me?" I snapped at him, "Luck of the draw." He continued to complain, and I couldn't help myself. I said to him, "If this is the worst thing that ever happens to you in your whole life, you've had a pretty good life." Then he remembered that he failed his final exam last week, and he mercifully shut up.

The nice lady inspecting my bags then asked that I direct my attention to what she was doing, because it is required that I OBSERVE her inspecting my bags.

That represents Category 1: Overly vigilant but sadly necessary. I have no idea how I would have procured a bomb, a knife, a gun, or anything else in the airport after I had already been through one security screening (and pat down), but I guess some terrorists are clever enough to accomplish it. While it was a tad aggravating, the plane did NOT leave without me, and the overhead bins weren't full when I was finally allowed to board the plane. I continued to smile throughout the entire ordeal, determined NOT to behave as my mother would have, and it didn't last nearly as long as the ten hours it felt like while it was happening.

Then there's Category 2: Ridiculous and logic-defying.

When we arrived at the Customs area of the Atlanta airport, we joined approximately 800 of our closest friends. I'm sure they didn't schedule all international flights to land at the same time. Probably. The lines snaked around and snaked around, so I pulled out my Kindle and continued reading the book I had started on the plane. I'm surprised I wasn't accosted for violating some kind of security rule against reading while in line. Never mind the two people I saw/heard talking on their cell phones, oblivious of (or ignoring?) the signs posted everywhere that using cell phones and cameras in that area was forbidden.

We made it through Customs after about 35 minutes, then we proceeded to Baggage Claim.

Here's the ridiculous and logic-defying part: After we claimed our checked bag, we had to walk about 100 yards, around a corner, and CHECK IT AGAIN. Never mind that Atlanta was our final destination. All checked bags on international flights have to be claimed in Customs, rechecked, and then claimed AGAIN at Baggage Claim upstairs. Apparently that rule is unique to the airports in Atlanta and Memphis. (Memphis?)

AND WE HAD TO GO THROUGH SECURITY AGAIN. TO GET OUT OF THE AIRPORT.  Complete with removing the shoes, taking the laptop out of the case, emptying the pockets, and (in Hubby's case) a full-body scan with one of those nifty machines that everybody has been raising hell about.

Huh?

Usually I can determine why a certain rule is necessary, but this one has me stumped. If I made it through security at the originating airport (with an additional screening and pat down, I remind you), and I have been within the confined of the airport for the entire journey from the plane to Customs, how in the world could I have procured anything dangerous or illegal? Hell, how could I have procured anything LEGAL?

Once we were on the ground in Atlanta, it took as much time to get out of the airport as it took for the ENTIRE FLIGHT BACK FROM JAMAICA.

Combine all these events with the fact that Hubby's blood sugar was probably tanking, and you would be correct if you guessed that he was quite the grumpy traveler by the time we got to our car.

I'm making a list of things we will do differently the next time we travel out of the country. But I've got to give Hubby time to forget this one first.

We're Back........

Just a quick blog post to let you know we made it home from Jamaica. The trip was wonderful, and I'll have lots to blog about in coming days, including my Jamaican bicycle adventure.

When I wrote my blog entries ahead of time and scheduled them to post while we were gone, I didn't plan one for tonight. I thought with a flight that landed at 7:00 PM, and living only an hour away from the airport, that I would have plenty of time to write a coherent (if not fraught with witty reflections on our trip) blog post at my regular time tonight.

I forgot all about going through Customs and the nightmare that is airport security. My experiences with security on both ends of the return flight home will be an entire blog post all by themselves.

I also hope to have some decent pictures from the trip. I read a few blogs on the plane (Delta was offering free wi-fi for the holidays - yay!), but it will take me a few days to get caught up completely.

It's always good to come home, but I seriously wish I were still in a place where the low temperature for the night was 72 degrees.

Sigh.

Hell is Not a Place.......

......it's a train ride.

......with two middle school students.

Thank you to my friend Maggie for jogging my memory with her post about a train trip this weekend and giving me something to blog about tonight. Sometimes coming up with a topic is the hardest part.

I taught middle school for three years. This is the period in my life that I refer to as "the-closest-to-hell-that-I-ever-want-to-come" years. One year a colleague of mine organized a trip to New York City for the fledgling middle school newspaper staff. That was back in the years when you didn't have to make an academic connection in order to take students on a field trip. You just had to make the money connection and you were good to go.

There were two students in this little group of ten whose parents would not allow them to fly. One was because he was allegedly "claustrophobic," and I don't forget the rationale of the other one. The principal said if those two couldn't go, no one could go, and the trip organizer began looking for someone who would agree to accompany those two on the train.

Because I was young and stupid and couldn't say no to anyone, much less anyone named Cay (her last name was Kelly, and I thought it was a shame to spell her first name with a "C", considering the alliteration thing they apparently had going on and all), I agreed to take those two students on the train. How bad could it be?

How bad CAN eighteen hours on a train be when you can't even go to the club car? Do you know how many times an Amtrak train stops between Georgia and the Big Apple? Twenty-three. Twenty-three times this bad boy stopped, no more than 45 minutes between any two stops. It was like trying to sleep in a hospital. Without the drugs.

It was nighttime when we got on the train, so things were relatively quiet. We settled down in our seats and I advised the students to sleep as much as they could. None of us could sleep very much, forever, for watching the couple in the front of our car.

They were young and obviously in love. And it's possible they had spent a great deal of time in the club car. They made out heavily, sometimes sitting in the same seat. They couldn't keep their hands off each other, and I thought my little sixth-grade girl and eighth-grade boy's eyes would bug out of their heads. I thought to myself, "How sweet. They must be on their honeymoon. But they really, really should tone it down."

This went on throughout the night, until sometime in the wee hours when we pulled into a station somewhere in Virginia. And SHE got off the train. There was a young man waiting for her on the platform, and they walked away arm-in-arm as the train pulled out of the station. If I could have opened that window, I seriously would have yelled, "Do you know what she's been DOING all night?" He got off the train in some other state, looking what I thought was smug and self-satisfied. Satisfied. Heh heh. I made a funny.

We had left Georgia around 9:00 PM, and we chugged into Penn Station in NYC sometime around 3:00 the next afternoon. We had been instructed to take a cab from the station to our hotel, which was easy to do even considering the fact that I had never been in a cab in my life. We didn't have those out in the country. The cab ride itself, however, was a gut-wrenching experience. It was wilder than any roller coaster I had ever been on, and the two students were scared to death.

Some other highlights of that trip included dinner at Sardi's, where we fully expected to see some famous people but were disappointed, and the students, being middle schoolers, counted their money down to the exact penny when we paid for dinner. It took longer to settle the bill than it did to be served. It was pretty close to the length of the train ride. I was embarrassed that we looked like country bumpkins off the farm for the first time.

We took a bus tour of the city and got to see the Statue of Liberty up close and personal. But the line to WALK up the steps was about four hours long, so we didn't get to do that. Our tour bus got stuck somewhere in Harlem for a while when it tried to go down a narrow street, where cars were parked on both sides.


We went to the Empire State Building, but many of the students refused to spend their money to go to the observation platform when there was a McDonald's right across the street. We bought cheap t-shirts, and even I was puzzled when they came out of the wash the first time looking like trapezoids.

You would think I would learn about volunteering to accompany students on trips out of the state. But fast forward fourteen years, when I found myself as a chaperon on Sweet Girl's high school band's trip to . . . you guessed it . . . New York City.

This time Hell was not a place . . . it was a bus ride.

One-Night Stand......

Hubby and I are in a hotel (?) in a very small town in South Georgia. We made the 3 1/2 hour trek down here after I got home from school today. That is such an unnecessary sentence that any English teacher worth her salt would strike through it twenty times with a red pen.

The purpose of our visit is to look at a motorhome that Hubby found for sale on the internet.

It's NOT like one of these.

Unless we win the Mega Millions lottery tonight, with a jackpot of $333 million. I'd settle for just the 3 on the end of that number.

More like one of these.


And while I would like to say that I will post photos of the REAL motorhome we are going to inspect tomorrow, that won't be possible because A) I left my camera at home; and B) the battery in it is dead anyway. I may be able to take one or two pictures with my Blackberry.

Then a 60-mile (?) bike ride on Sunday with Katydid and the rest of Team Chi-Chis. And sometime this weekend I have to find time to buy groceries and grade the bazillion assignments that my online students have managed to turn in just today.

Damn these over-achievers!

Sometimes I Wish I Were a Man.....

Not really, but sometimes I wish I at least had a wife. Or a personal assistant. Or a Sherpa.

Packing for Hubby is so easy.

[And yes, I pack his clothes anytime he goes out of town, whether I'm going with him or not. And I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Much.]

We're going to be gone three days, so I throw in three pairs of shorts and three golf shirts that match. He wouldn't even care if they didn't match, but I do. I usually pack at least one UGA shirt when we're going out of state. A couple of t-shirts for walking on the beach in the morning, socks, underwear, bathing suits, he's done.

Packing for myself is much more complicated. And I am not ..... I repeat NOT ..... fashion-conscious. I pack shorts and t-shirts for walking on the beach or hanging out during the day, but it's not the sort of thing I would wear to dinner. Or the casino. So I have to pack for daytime and nighttime. With an extra outfit thrown in for safe measure. Just in case someone sneaks an extra day in on me somewhere. Flip-flops for the beach and pool, sneakers for walking, and don't even get me started on the necessity for a separate pair of shoes for each outfit. This time I didn't go that route; I'm taking one pair of white sandals, and they have to go with everything. Two swimsuits ..... okay, three because I couldn't decide ..... and a cover-up. Every bra I own because I can never remember which ones are really comfortable, and I didn't feel like trying them on. Two pairs of underwear for every day, because you can't go walk on the beach and then change into a swimsuit and then put the SAME UNDERWEAR back on to go to dinner. Sorry if that's TMI. A couple of bandanas, socks for the sneakers, sports bras for walking. My toiletries bag and make-up case.

We will take no fewer than 6 bags with us in the morning, by the time we load up the suitcases (2), the laptop, my CPAP machine, a bag of snacks because Hubby evidently thinks we're going to run the risk of starving to death way off in the wilds of ..... Florida. A bag with our swim things in it because we might not be able to check in right away. A cooler. Or two.

I TOLD him we should rent a motorhome.

Home Sweet Home.....

Going through Customs pretty much sucked, until I realized that about three-fourths of those people were merely making connecting flights, and we were almost HOME. That made it so much better. I heard one family on the plane saying they had TWO more flights before they got home.

Hubby and I went through the connecting-flight nightmare on our last trip to the Dominican Republic. But I'm too tired to retell it tonight. Maybe later. Maybe I'll save it for one of those "what-in-the-hell-am-I-going-to-blog-about-tonight" nights.

Update from Paradise......

I can't begin to describe how huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge this place is. Or at least it will be, when they finish it. They're still building steadily. And it isn't nearly full, even the buildings that ARE finished.

There appears to be approximately one swimming pool per registered guest. We had to ask a couple very nicely today to please get out of our pool. Just kidding.





While downloading pictures from yesterday, I found several I couldn't explain. Like this one:

Problem is, I took them all. Did I mention this is one of those all-inclusive resorts, where all food....and drink.....is included?


We even sat through a sales presentation for a membership at this lovely place. For a mere $5000, we could have 10 weeks to use anytime at this or one of its sister resorts. Sounds like a bargain, but we'd also have to pay an additional $2000 each time if we actually wanted to eat. It was difficult for us to calculate exactly where the savings came in. But it wasn't high-pressure, and I had read online that it was worth it to sit through it for the $400 spa coupons. We're not even likely to use those, though.

Everything is huge. Our room is ginormous, the balcony is spacious, and we have our own jacuzzi in the room. Even a two-person shower.


Now I have some work to do for my online course. Goodnight!

Friday Night Fantasies.....

Get your minds out of the gutter.....not THAT kind of fantasies.

Some random places I'd like to be this weekend.

At the Oreo Cow Farm, where they gave out free beer and Oreo cookies during a bicycle ride. I had a beer; my sister had the Oreos.


St. Thomas.............

Cabo san Lucas, Mexico........


Charleston............

Gatlinburg.............


Watching a healthy Courtney Kupets compete in a gymnastics meet........


Las Vegas......

Myrtle Beach.......


St. Augustine (okay, probably not a wise choice, what with TS Fay churning around in North Florida).........


The Georgia-Florida football game...... with another win for the Dawgs......

A Billy Joel concert anywhere.......