Day 31: Homeward Bound
On a flight to Portland, six hours give or take from JFK, getting in just a little before midnight. My wife is meeting me at the airport, to taxi home with me — we’re both impatient to see each other again. I spent most of the day feeling antsy because I didn’t have anything else I needed to plan for or take care of after last night’s meetup.
I’m coming home with something upwards of 100GB worth of photos (jpegs from the SD960, RAW files from the 5D) and video (720p footage from the SD960), and a few hours of field recorder audio as well. What I’ll do with, exactly, I don’t know, but I’m going to try to do something.
Also, I’m a thief:
1. I managed to walk out the door of Afroblanco’s apartment with his keys in my pocket, which is complicated because he’s moving out tomorrow. We agreed that I’d mail them to his landlord tomorrow morning by the fastest available method and call it good that way.
2. I also, I discovered in the last couple hours, packed up koeselitz’s SD card reader when I was heading out of Denver. Another thing to throw in the mail.
As a sort of karmic retribution, I’m pretty sure I’ve donated at least one soap and one shampoo bottle to a couple of my various hosts. And then there’s the matter of that missing accessories bag, somewhere in Vermont, having its own weird adventure.
Hosts! This wouldn’t have been nearly as painless (or inexpensive!) as it was without the generosity of all the metafilter folks (and in some cases their families) who offered to put me up and give me rides and show me around their various towns. I should find some way to thank them all in more detail later, but for now let me just say: thanks, folks. This wouldn’t have been what it was without all your stunning hospitality.
And the meetups! Looking back on it, I’m stunned how much meetupery we packed into this month. And kind of stunned I managed to avoid any hangovers. (Though there is the matter of the Mysterious Chicago Sickness.) The meetups ran the gauntlet, from the homey troika in Utah to the friendly half-dozen in Baltimore to the 14 hour jaunt in Philly to the epic multi-day meetupathons in LA and Chicago, and everything in between.
And the food! And the bathroom mirrors! But I don’t think I should try to plow through everything right now. It was an absurd amount of travel, probably too much and too long by any reasonable standard, adn I’m going to need a while to decompress and go back over everything once I can get home and back into my normal routine. My normal, airport-free, hugging my wife whenever I feel like it routine.
I can’t wait to be home.
