Our Amazing Race

You have our passports, right?" Oh yes, those words were mentioned while travelling internationally. Not good.

In May of 2006, Matt and I went on our dream trip: Two weeks touring around Scotland and Ireland {with C.I.E tours}. It almost came to a screeching halt, what I am sure would have resulted in our being in jail, when we realized that we were missing a very important document needed for international travel.

We flew out of Newark International Airport at 6pm on Friday, May 19th, on British Airways. It wasn't the first time that either of us had traveled internationally and wasn't the first time that I had been to Ireland. But it was the FIRST time we had traveled so far away together {we went to Jamaica for our Honeymoon 6 months earlier}.


I hate flying to Europe. It takes WAY too long, and I don't sleep on planes....of course Matt was snoring quite peacefully as I began the 4th movie of the night, oblivious to the world. I watched the mini screen on the back of the seat in front of me, constantly checking to see where the little plane was on the map of our flight.

We landed in Heathrow, thinking we had a bit of time before our connecting flight to Edinburgh  when we realized that not only were we in the wrong line or terminal, we were in the wrong "town". We finally figured out where we were supposed to be, watching the clock tick closer and closer to our flight leaving for Scotland, perhaps without us.

We were all but running. Tick tick tick. We finally reached the gate, only to be told that they would be boarding the BUS, a BUS!, in a few minutes. A brief reprieve as we wheeled around the tarmac and we were running again. Not only was there a bus…oh no, that would’ve been too commonplace, but there was also a TRAIN that we needed to take to get to our plane. 

A train…across the whole of London-Heathrow Airport, just to get to the right terminal. Huffing and puffing, with our 2 weeks worth of luggage, because you have to transfer it yourself {and recheck it in}....tick tick tick tick.

The train comes to a stop and we bolt. "You have our passports right?" Matt reached in his pocket and his face blanched, "$hit!" I was standing near a door on the train, that hadn't closed yet, and jumped in the doorway so it couldn't close, fleeing with our passports.

Matt ran back several cars to our seats and there, tucked nicely in the C.I.E Tours folder sat our passports.

Finally, we were at the final place, luggage being checked, falling into our seats with mere minutes to spare before take off.

TWO HOURS! That's how long it took us to get from one flight to another in London Heathrow, and that is why I will avoid that airport at all cost.

Funny to think that’s it’s been 7 years, today since that Amazing Race. At least the rest of the trip went smoothly.

If you want to see more of our pictures from Scotland and Ireland, you can go HERE.

5 Minute Friday—Song

Song….

They say we’re supposed to have a song, but we don’t. That there are supposed to be some words from one musician, that encompass us in a few bars of black dots, but there isn’t. Sure, we have the song we danced to at our wedding {“Until” from Kate and Leopold by Sting}; sure, there were songs we liked for whatever season we were in. But there isn’t any ONE.

We come from the generation of mix tapes, then CD mixes…compilations of our own design, song that was more us in its randomness than in the beats and rhythms and measured time that 3 minutes contained. Mixes that weren’t uploaded to some generic MP3 player, but painfully laid out in perfect timing, labels that were scratched out in tiny handwriting. Mixes that couldn’t be just erased with a touch of delete, but that were beaten and scratched, played over and over until most of the songs skipped. Oh the mixes we’d make, song after song, some fast and upbeat, others slow and languid. It all was us, you and I, we think in song.

Last Friday, I walked out the back door, to the Moms’ Night Out group, that I started. Hearing the gate latch behind me, only one song played in my mind, “I’m Free” by The Who. The same one that played on those beautiful sunshine days of summer, when I left the ulcer-causing office behind me.

The song doesn’t play like it used, constantly and on loop, memorizing every single crescendo and staccato note. The silence is too priceless for me, to be marred by song. I miss it though. Music constantly pouring from the massive speakers you built in shop class when we were in high school, in all their gaudy electric blue and silver glory, still sitting above our kitchen cabinets, even now. Driving along the beautiful  back roads, smelling the damp earth of the woods, music blasting about how there’s nothin’ like the summer. Only when you’re home, does the song play again like it used to.

Lonesome drives home from Buzzards Bay. Five hours of songs, bewailing the distance between us, how I couldn’t take the miles, I couldn’t take the time until the next time I’d see you smile. Song that ticked off each mile marker on the road home. Song that blared from the lips of Celine Dion, as I drove all night to get to you.

There were binders and binders, and boxes and towers of tapes and CDs that we brought to OUR new home, now they collect dust in our attic, because they’ve been digitized. Song that has been reduced to nothing more than electronic code, no more is music a result of two objects brushing passed each other, gentle lovers.

No, for us there isn’t one song. There are a thousand songs, each singing a few discordant notes and uneven bars of what we’ve composed over the years.

 

1. Write for 5 minutes flat for pure unedited love of the written word.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. Be generous and leave an encouraging comment for the person who linked up before you. That’s the best part about this community.

Coming Clean

You’ve been seeing a lot more words in disclaimers in recent posts of mine, things telling you that by clicking/purchasing through a link I share that I might receive a small percentage of your order. There’s a reason for that: The FTC {Federal Trades Commission} is cracking down on bloggers. Meaning that we now have to follow several different procedures in any post in which we mention products, as well as if we recommend them or link to a POS {Point of Sale}.

I know all of my readers are smart enough to not take anything I say as the absolute word, that you’re intelligent enough to decide on whether something is a good book {most of what my reviews are about} for you or not.  But the FTC is wanting to protect you guys, by asking bloggers to always be very clear in our posts about any course of action you might take as a result of what we’ve written, and to not only be clear, but to restate it several times throughout.

That said.

I now have a disclosure policy on my blog, stating a lot of the above required information. You can find that HERE.

You’ll also see a lot of additional text in posts declaring it to contain affiliate links, and that opinions expressed are my own, and a lot of other now necessary things.

As always, I’m not going to waste your time or my time, trying to sell you something that I don’t think is worthwhile. I’m going to continue to share HONESTLY with you about what I think of different books and such that I’ve had the opportunity to review. Sometimes those are things I’ve received for free, in exchange for an HONEST review….sometimes those are things that I’ve purchased myself and felt strongly enough about to write a post about.

Also, NOT EVERY LINK on this blog is an affiliate link. Sometimes I do just share links to things that I think are worth sharing. If you don’t see the disclaimer/affiliate thing in a post, it’s just a link and nothing more.

If you’d like to read more information about the why and the what, my friend Kalyn from CreativeSavingsBlog.com has a wonderful post up on her blog {don’t worry, this isn’t an affiliate link}.