A Really Big Computer

Blog 2805, 30 October 2022, Sunday                        

Dear friend,

We are home, half wondering where we are, what we did, and what now. After spending a long day with two flights, airplane food, robotic behavior, we arrived home late on Saturday. There was a flurry of activity, grocery shopping, connecting with neighbors, turning everything on, checking what needed to be checked, and then we crashed. Our intent was to fight jet lag by staying awake until 9, by six-thirty I was done with trying to stay awake. I think Jean soon followed but I have no recollection until I awoke in the dark in a strange room with the numbers 12:12 staring at me. After thirty seconds of bafflement, I realized those numbers were familiar. When the second 12 switched to 13, I realized where I was and then tried to remember where the bathroom was. By the time I did, I was wide awake, at midnight, in the most comfortable bed I’d been in for months. That was probably my moment of homecoming. I’m home!

Following my usual pattern, I got up, closed the door to the bedroom, went into my study and thought it was the most amazing room I’d ever been in my life. After months of daintily picking my way on the keyboard of my little Asus laptop, I turned on my big Mac (no infringing on McDonald’s here) and lit up the study. It felt like I’d left the pilot’s seat of a Piper Cub and fired up a 747. The room was filled with light, and for the first time in months I had to remember what my password was. After a brief moment of panic, I got it right, then mentally went through the other passwords I needed. Then I began my new day doing that which I have loved doing for the last decade, I wrote “Dear friend,” on the top line of my blog. I was home.

How we got home, it happened in this manner. We trained into Hamburg, taxied to the Leonardo Hotel, and reorganized all our luggage to have one carry-on and two duffle bags, 10.2 and 11.5 kg, easily under Lufthansa’s draconian weight restrictions. Our alarm sounded at 4:50, I was already awake, packed, and pacing. I wanted the day to be over, even before it began. Jean packed her final one percent; we needed another taxi because our hotel was across the freeway from the airport but there was no pedestrian way to get there. We checked in, we were untroubled, and flew for an hour to Frankfort, and with a hour and forty minutes between flights barely had time to walk the distance from the A concourse to the Z concourse. If you ever fly through that airport, you might want to register as needing a wheelchair, probably motorized.

Then, for the next eleven hours, we went into mental and physical hibernation. Armed with support socks, reading material, and a TV screen the size of my baby laptop, time passed.

By the time we’d landed, we’d been awake 23 hours. We just wanted to get home; however, I was traveling with a Wahlstrom. At the Arrival stand at Sea-Tac, they came in two cars to greet us. Like the weary grump I am, when they delivered our car (which is why there were two cars, so they didn’t have to walk home), I got in the car and Jean, bless her Wahlstrom heart, was back there greeting, hugging, honoring them while I sat in our car, at the airport’s “Pick Up But Do Not Stop” section, thinking “I could go home now.” I probably offended them a little, but I knew we were swinging my Jane’s place to gather the stuff she’d carried home for us when she left Barcelona. I just wanted to be home. I am home. If I’m awake, I’ll be at church today, but otherwise I’ll be nesting in my study, listening to radio stations and TV stations where people speak English, drinking free refills, and I know I won’t have to pack for quite a while. Thanks for sharing the trip with us. Love,

Jeannmarv

Written and Posted, 2 a.m., Sunday