As we arrived in San Diego yesterday, Kim got an email from Melisa telling us that she wanted to share a surprise she had found in our yard. Mike and Melisa walk their dog, Rex, several time a day and most often walk past our property in both directions. Mike is very focused on the exercise part of the walk, but Melisa is always looking about and occasionally comments to me about this or that which she might notice around the garden she can see from the road. I appreciate Melisa’s comments and always find them thoughtful and most often spot on. Melisa can have strong opinions (something that afflicts many of us), but she also has very good taste in her aesthetics, including in her garden presentations. So, when we got this message on our way home from the airport, we were both curious. We spent our return day getting Buddy out of day care and languishing in the comfort of our return to our home. It had been a long trip home from Buenos Aires through Atlanta and then into San Diego. Both flights were not only on time, but actually 15-20 minutes early each, so there was nothing to complain about with regard to the airlines. But no matter, traveling is still a bitch these days (perhaps its these days and perhaps its better to say “at this point in life”…I’m not so sure which).
We had started the day onboard the Viking Jupiter, having put our large baggage outside the cabin the prior night for the porters to whisk away into the terminal building, and had enough time to get out of the room by 8am to go to the World Cafe for breakfast so that we could get off the ship by 9am. Remember, Viking had a whole new retinue of passengers boarding the ship and presumably settling into our cabin for the next 21 day cruise up the coast of Brazil and then over to the Azores, Morocco and finally Barcelona. Guest turn-around on these ships is always a forced march, and we are yesterday’s cruise and yesterday’s news to Viking (even though they are as gracious as possible under the circumstances). After a day in a black van with driver, we got to the airport at 4pm, a full five hours before departure (they recommend 3 hours minimum). We needed most of that five hours to get through the chicane of the Buenos Aires airport on the day with two large cruise ships unleashing its passenger rosters (Oceania and Viking had coordinated schedules for some reason).
Once on the Delta plane heading for Atlanta, I would have thought we were all good. Certainly our bags were in the hands of the Gods, checked through to San Diego…but not really. The protocol requires you to go through immigration and customs in Atlanta and that requires you to fetch your bags (no porters here) and get them through customs (a non-event as always) only to wheel them around a corner to a place were they could actually be again deposited with the baggage Gods to get to San Diego. The bags even came off the first flight very quickly (ours were literally the first up onto the carousel), so without much ado, we were off to the gate to await our connecting flight to San Diego. I have no complaints against the Atlanta airport except that like most big city airports, it’s big. I know it wouldn’t be big unless it was necessary for it to be big to handle the sheer volume of passengers that want or need to fly. And that’s the way it is all over. The BA airport is FAR bigger than when I was last there thirty years ago and the Atlanta airport seems to have always been big…and to round things out, even our cute little San Diego airport has almost finished its 2X renovation, so it too is getting bigger. There is no getting around it. The world is traveling at a greater and greater pace and volume. I refuse to allow myself to be bothered by more people being able to or wanting to travel more. If it’s a good thing for me, why shouldn’t it be a good thing for others? Once again, this is just another price of the 8 billion person world we have created and I’m one of those who believe that they each and every one have the right to aspire for the self actualization to do things like travel and see the rest of the world as I have had the opportunity to do.
In my lazy day mode I have turned to a documentary I stumbled on called 180 South. It is about one guy who surfs and climbs traveling to Patagonia to climb the Corcovado Volcano, a sight we say on our way south from Puerto Montt along the Chilean fjord highway. On that voyage he meets up with Yvon Chuinard (Patagonia) and Doug Tompkins (North Face) and went on to proselytize about environmentalism and conservation philanthropy. As admirable as those two veteran climbers and business builders are, there are few out there who can do what they did on the scale that they did it. They have had the resources to enjoy the distant parts of the world (like Patagonia) and still minimize their environmental footprint. For the rest of the regular folks of the world, just getting a chance to see it is a dream and is enough. The end result of all this egalitarianism is that everyone seems to be traveling and it makes traveling for the older among us more and more of a chore each time we go out. From leaving the ship until arriving home was a total of thirty + hours, and any way you slice that, its wearying. Now that I’ve spent thirty + hours here at home (including ten of those asleep…an amazing accomplishment for this insomniac), I feel like I have more or less recovered. I guess that means I am at a point of indifference when it comes to the rigors of travel. Once I get to the point when the recovery takes a lot longer than the travel itself, I suppose that will be my sign that I’ve had enough. We’ll see how that equation goes on the next few trips.
First thing this morning I got a call from a potential client asking me to take on an assignment that sounded way off from anything I normally do. He wanted to send a retainer right away. While I am known to be impulsive, something didn’t feel right so I had the good sense to make a few calls to check on my instincts and as they were proven correct, I ended the day emailing him a rejection of the assignment. After doing so, my partner sent me a report on the prospective client which confirmed my instincts. It was a small diversion and may seem like a small thing, but it might have created a big problem had I gone forward.
When Melisa came by later in the day, I was ready for something more pleasant in an otherwise gloomy day that felt a bit fuzzy. She took Kim and me down to the northern end of the road frontage and pointed up in one of the Palo Verde trees. There in the tree, just above eye level, was a small pouch of lichen-covered twigs woven into handsome and yet petit nest where the smallest of humming birds sat atop what we presume are a few small eggs. It made Kim very happy to see this reaffirmation of life on our hilltop and anything that makes Kim happy makes me happy. It was a good day. Sometimes, it’s the little things that make it so.