Lift Up Your Hearts!

I've been overseas every year for the past decade, so it ought to be routine by now.  But travelling to the Gambia is not like travelling to Japan or to Switzerland.  For starters, we needed visas.

Most visitors to the Gambia don't need visas, but the United States is special.  American tourists are required to fill out a bunch of paperwork and fork over $100 (each). Because we have family overseas, we are always a bit nervous when our passports are out of our hands, but the process went smoothly and we had them back, with the necessary visas, in just a few days.

Then there was the medical side.  Immunizations (yellow fever, typhoid, meningococcal, hepatitis A & B) and medications (malarone to be taken daily as an anti-malarial, Cipro in case of traveller's diarrhea, probiotics in case we had to use the Cipro) cost us some $1200.  We were spared the rabies vaccine, although if the doctor had known how many stray dogs we were to encounter, the story might have been different.  Our insurance company believes in funding preventive medicine, they say, but clearly their idea of tropical disease prevention is encouraging people to stay home.

And finally, the new wardrobe.  As nearly all of you know, I'm not a shopper, I don't care anything about clothes as long as they are comfortable, and the occasions for which I will put on a dress or a skirt are so rare as to be barely perceptible.  (Weddings of family members.  That's about it.) But then Kathy happened to mention—fortunately, in time for us to do something about the problem—that I'd need to wear a skirt or dress (mid-calf or longer) whenever we went out in public, and even at home if we had visitors.

I suppose most women would have just packed a few dresses and been fine.  I needed to go shopping (oh, joy) and climb over a major psychological barrier.  Dresses, after all, are the tools and symbols of oppression.  Oppression of women by men, of children by parents, of students by teachers.  Unless you happen to be the queen, or to live in Scotland, skirts are not associated with power.

While I might not be as sensitive as some in my family to shirt tags and wrinkles in my socks, it's still an issue for me, and I still remember, and not happily, the time when as a very young child I was required to wear a certain dress—beautiful, and hand-made with lots of love, but very scratchy—for an interminable period.  Really, it was just long enough to go to the photographer's for a professional picture, but it was torture to me.  I'm grateful that most of the time my mother was more merciful when it came to my clothes, but dresses = discomfort was ingrained in me from an early age.

And then there was school.  As if school weren't oppressive enough all by itself, in those days all girls were required to wear dresses or skirts and blouses.  Even on the playground, even in gym class.  Girl Scout uniforms were dresses. Church clothes were dresses. Believe me, if it had been possible for me to get used to wearing skirts, I had plenty of opportunity to do so.  It didn't happen.

On top of that, dresses in those days were not loose and flowy, but short and tight.  It was the era of the miniskirt; even for the more conservative among us hemlines had to be above the knee, greatly limiting movement and action.  A dress was a prison.  But the times, they were a-changin.' When I went off to college I left my dresses behind me, and after graduation being a computer programmer allowed me to land a job without much in the way of a dress code.  I'm not certain, but I think the next time I wore a skirt was at the rehearsal dinner before our wedding.

Hence my psychological shock at Kathy's statement.  Oh, tourists can get away with anything for the sake of their euros, and students sometimes wear jeans and t-shirts, and the rules in that patriarchal society are much looser for men—though Porter still could not wear shorts despite being just 13.5 degrees away from the equator.  But mature women do not show their legs in the Gambia.  Not if they want to be respected.  Kathy quite rightly did not want her American friends to embarrass her Gambian friends.  We probably did, anyway, because Gambian women dress beautifully at all times, and even the men have a keen sense of style.  But at least we weren't immodest. (Incidentally, Gambians have a much healthier attitude toward public breastfeeding than Americans; it's legs that have to stay covered.)

Nothing about the experience was as bad as the anticipation.  The shopping was the worst, but Kohl's and Target (both online) came through with three acceptable skirts at reasonable prices.  They were even comfortable, as skirts go, because they were soft and loose and long.  I ended up only bringing two with me, not wanting to take the time to do necessary hemming on the last one, but why should I need more than two?  We wouldn't be going out in public that much, would we? (Well, yes, we would.  But two skirts were still sufficient.)

My sister-in-law made an odd but brilliant suggestion, in the form of mid-thigh underwear from the Vermont Country Store. I was skeptical, and indeed they did not suit me as underwear.  But as something to wear under my skirt and over my usual underwear, they were perfect for the Gambian weather situation:  temperatures in the 90's and no air conditioning.  The over-underwear did a wonderful job of absorbing the sweat that otherwise poured uncomfortably down my legs.  (As a Floridian, I'm accustomed to hot weather, but deal with it by [1] wearing shorts, and [2] relying on air conditioning.)  There's also no overestimating the psychological value:  they felt like shorts on my body, which helped undo some of the mental discomfort.  I had one other trick up my sleeve as well:  When I caught myself feeling overpowered and bowed down because I was wearing a skirt, I imagined being a Scottish chieftain, and that actually worked—even though my skirt could hardly have looked less like a kilt.

We were out in public a lot.  As Kathy explained, the Gambia is a hard place to be an introvert.  Although I would usually rip my skirt off in favor of shorts as soon as we walked in the door of her house—in order to cool down a little—for most of our two weeks in the Gambia, I lived in a skirt.

And we developed an uneasy friendship, the skirts and I.  After returning home, I washed them and put them away in the back of our closet, so glad, as they say, to see the back of them.  But one day, after sufficient time has passed, I will pull them out again and wear them for some occasion, perhaps a party.  I'm glad to have them in my arsenal of clothing.  Being loose, long, and of soft material they are a far cry from the dresses of my childhood.  Besides, they are full of wonderful memories!

As for the rest of our trip preparations, I suppose they were mostly normal.  We had our tickets, our visas, our "yellow cards" showing yellow fever immunizations, our anti-malarial meds, the proper clothing, and a few gifts.  It was time to begin the adventure!

I know people who are fond of saying, as if it were original with them and somehow encouraging to others, that we should never ask for what we deserve, because what we all deserve is Hell.  As unhelpful as this aphorism is, there are times when everyday life points to a kernel of truth there.  We remember vividly the times when we've done something stupid and paid the price, or done something stupid and managed somehow to escape disaster, but we may not even be aware of how many, many times we've been equally stupid, or more so, and escaped scot free.  How often have we taken a foolish chance while driving, or set a can of soda near the computer, or carried a large stack of breakable objects?  How many times have we thought, "I knew that was going to happen" when a foolish risk has ended badly?  Truly, when we know what we should do and act otherwise, do we deserve to escape the consequences?  No—but surprising often, grace abounds anyway.

It's an old, sad story, and out of respect for those who, like me, are not fond of suspense, I'll say up front that this one has a happy ending.

I'm usually a bit compulsive when it comes to doing backups.  I have general backups, and specific backups.  Whole and incremental backups.  Backups divided over several years and different external drives.  But I'm not perfect about it, and this was one of those times.

Mostly I find a once-a-week backup sufficient for my needs, but recently I've been working pedal-to-the-metal on processing our photos and videos from the Gambia, so I got into the habit of backing up my work every night.  See, I know the right thing to do!  But one night the backup system gave me trouble.  Instead of spending the next day sorting it out, I carried on feverishly with my work.  I was making such good progress!  Who could be bothered with a problem that was, I knew, going to be frustrating and time-consuming to sort out?  So for a few days—highly productive days—that nightly backup didn't happen.

I'm a big fan of the recycle bin.  I love that a deleted file doesn't really disappear right away, so that accidents and mistakes are reversible.  However, some files, such as video files, are too big for such treatment.  For those I use the shift-delete function, which bypasses the recycle bin and erases the file directly.

One morning I was working with a number of video files, and got a little too careless with my quick response to the "Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file?" question.  I was certain I had highlighted the video I was done with, but Windows Explorer had other ideas.  You want to delete the entire directory?  The entire directory with your final processed photos?  The directory that represents 60+ hours' worth of work?  Fine, no problem, I can do that for you in under a second.

I stared at the computer.  I didn't believe what appeared to have happened.  I turned my computer inside out, searched from top to bottom.  Finally I let myself admit that the files were gone.  Completely.  Gone.

I was surprisingly calm.  Sometimes big events leave you too overwhelmed to be upset.  Besides, I did have some backups, though they were, as I said, a few days old, and the most recent one had been corrupted by the above-mentioned problem.  But as I also said, I'm usually compulsive about backups, and if I didn't have my work in final form, I did have it in next-to-final form, and the form before that, and the form before that.  What had been done once could be done again, and though the magnitude of effort lost was mind-boggling, I took comfort in a comment reader-friend Eric once made here about work being done better the second time around.

As it turned out, we'll never know how much better I would have done the second time, and that's more than fine with me.

When files are deleted from a drive, even by shift-delete, they're not really erased.  They're no longer visible to the user, but the data's there until it's overwritten.  I knew that, but had no idea how to take advantage of it.  Then a little Internet research led me to a data-recovery program called Recuva.

Had my files been on the C drive, I may have been in trouble, because I did quite a bit of work before finding that program, and the more time that elapses, the more likely the data is to be overwritten.  But because of space considerations, my data was on an external drive that I had been careful not to write to since the loss.  The operating system, or some other program not under my control, probably did something, but—to shorten the story—with the help of Recuva I was able to recover all but about half a dozen files.  The few that had been damaged I easily recreated from the next-to-final layer.  I'm very grateful I did not accidentally delete a higher-level directory!

Curious as to what an overwritten file looks like?  Here are an original and its corrupted version.  You can still see some of the basic structure.  (Click to enlarge.)

Once I had the program downloaded and unzipped to a flash drive, using Recuva to restore the files was quick and easy.  The long and tedious part of the job came in checking the integrity of the recovered files, but that only took five or six hours, and by the next day I was back to where I'd been 24 hours earlier.

With one important exception:  I now have Recuva on that flash drive, available should I need it again.  It's especially important to have it handy in case I ever need to recover files from the C drive, where overwriting can happen quickly.  Which I sincerely hope never happens!

It's amazing how easy it is to accept the loss of a day's work—which normally would have had me tearing my hair—when faced with the realization that the loss could have been many times greater.

Truly, grace abounds.

I'm sorting through the photos from our Gambia trip.  During our safari in the Fathala Game Reserve in Senegal, I hastily wrote down the names of the animals so that I could properly identify the pictures.  That is, I wrote down what I thought I heard our guide say. Her English was excellent but heavily-accented, and I knew that what I heard could not possibly be right.  But I wrote it as I heard it, counting on the Internet to help me after we returned home.

It did.  For those of you who are curious,

"Rowland antelope" = roan antelope

"yellowbill asparagus" = yellow-billed oxpecker.  I knew it couldn't be "asparagus," but that was the closest I could come.

"red vervet monkey" = "patas monkey."  I am certain I heard "red vervet monkey," but I couldn't find any red vervet monkeys by name, although many images showed them as a brownish-red color, even though they are apparently often called green monkeys.  Google also suggested red velvet cake, which didn't help.  Then I found this Wikipedia article, which suggests this of the patas monkey (which looks very much like what we saw):

The patas monkey (Erythrocebus patas) ... is a ground-dwelling monkey distributed over semi-arid areas of West Africa, and into East Africa. It is the only species classified in the genus Erythrocebus. Recent phylogenetic evidence indicates that it is the closest relative of the vervet monkey (Chlorocebus aethiops), suggesting nomenclatural revision.

So I'm sticking with the name our African guides gave it.

Here are a couple from other parts of our stay:

"nests vled vivas yellow female" = some sort of weaver birds' nests, possibly village weaver, possibly Vieillot's weaver.  This was a tough one, from our Janjanbureh trip.  Fortunately, birding in the Gambia is a popular tourist activity, so that helped.  Which particular weaver "vled" is supposed to represent, I can't guess.

"never die plant heal wound kill snake" =  moringa plant.  This was tougher than it should have been, because where I saw it, the plant had other plants growing with it, and its own leaves had been mostly stripped off.  But finally I'm convinced that this is it, despite there being no mention online to confirm our host's contention that it kills, or even repels, snakes.

The rest I actually heard correctly, though I didn't write down as much as I would have liked to.  "Write down" meant changing the file name of the camera image to include the label, not the easiest of ways to take notes, but it's what I had.

Many of you know that we recently returned from a two-week trip to the Gambia, that tiny country within Senegal in West Africa.  Since I never fully appreciate an experience until I've written about it, I've started a new category here, in which I'll put both travel memories and Gambia-inspired musings.  Expect it to be rather random; if I wait to get it all organized I'll have forgotten too much.  (Lots of thinking to do, many activities, and over 1600 photos.) In the meantime, here's some background.

After a couple of false starts some 45 years ago, I finally found a college roommate who became a friend for life.  (Realize that in those dark ages, even smokers and non-smokers were often paired up to live together!)  Kathy went on to get a Ph.D. in mathematics and enjoy a long career as a university professor with a well-deserved reputation as an excellent and caring teacher.  Several years ago she embarked on a different sort of adventure altogether, and is now a math professor (and department chair) at the University of the Gambia, with an even stronger reputation for both excellence and caring.  She's not there for the adventure (although there is plenty of that), nor for the salary (meagre), and certainly not for the working conditions, but to make a difference in the world.  Yes, she's a saint, a fact of which I'm all the more convinced since our visit.  (You can ignore this part, Kathy, assuming your flaky Internet connection lets you see it.  You and I both know you're still the crazy person I knew back in college.) Perhaps it's more useful—since labelling people as saints tends to put them out of reach—to say that she's a Christian called by God to use her skills and experience in an unusual place. However you look at it, she's there, and is making a difference.  The world, Africa, the Gambia, even the University—these are too large to exhibit visible change.  But without a doubt she has for a number of years been changing the lives of families and individuals for the better.

However, despite the University's state of denial, she won't be in the Gambia forever.  Hence our determination to seize the year (and the presence of this trip on my 95 by 65 list).  The only reasonable time to make the trip was in January, which is during the dry season and between semesters for Kathy.  Coming during the dry season turns out to be very, very important: the weather, though still hot (90's) is much more pleasant, the mosquitos are much less numerous, and transportation tends to be through a few inches of dust instead of a foot or more of garbage-and-water. Definitely the time to go!

So we went.

Some people travel for adventure.  Others for the educational and cultural growth.  As much as I value the latter, the primary importance of travel for me is still being with family and friends—and specifically, seeing them in their native habitat, as it were, so that their stories and experiences have more meaning when I hear them from far away.  The educational experiences are a great bonus thrown in, and on this trip we even had a few adventures.

Stay tuned.

I wrote this in response to someone's Facebook discussion, and put too much time into it not to save it here.  The subject was the very survival of America, and one optimist had said, "Doom and gloom speak just because the candidates of your choice aren't winning. People have been saying for over 200 years that the country is doomed if so and so gets elected to office. Well the country is still here and alive and well."  This was my response:

It is true that of the presidents I have experienced, the ones I thought were good people (Carter, Bush II) turned out to be terrible presidents, and the ones I thought were nuts (Reagan, Clinton) turned out much better than I could have imagined. Sometimes good intentions aren't enough, and sometimes people rise to the office. And good and bad luck have more effect than we admit.

Our recent trip to the Gambia convinced me that the best equipment in the world will not survive ignorance, abuse, and lack of regular maintenance. I worry not only for the United States, but for all of Western Civilization. It is under attack from all sides, from the Terrorists Formerly Known as ISIS to American college campuses. We whose mighty heritage this is have not done well in keeping it clean and oiled. Instead of fixing the broken parts, we trash them. Our children have no idea how to keep this great gift of the ages in working order. The beliefs that massive debt (personal and national) is okay; that name-calling is rational discourse; that our own failures are actually someone else's fault; that success implies not hard work but ill-gotten gains; that poor, even immoral, choices should not have consequences; that those who disagree with us are somehow subhuman and deserve whatever we can heap upon them—these attitudes, much more than whoever gains the highest office, are what will bring us down.

Sure, there are still pockets of resistance, but they're getting smaller and weaker. There's still hope—but only, I think, if we realize, as the great Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I had a 325-day streak going on my DuoLingo language lessons.  I managed to maintain it through our long plane flight to the Gambia, and through the first couple of days there, even though Internet was spotty and difficult.  But then we went on a five-day trip up-country where there was No. Internet. At. All.  Nada.

DuoLingo allows you to "buy" (with credits) a "streak freeze" by which you can suspend your streak and restart.  That's the theory, anyway.  However, you can only buy such an extension one day at a time, so even though I have so many credits I could suspend for 137 days, that did me no good at all when I couldn't access the Internet for several days in a row.

I'm okay with all this, though I wish DuoLingo had a more useful "suspend" function.  Streaks can be motivating, and the daily reminders certainly helped me establish a good habit.  But while striving to keep up a streak can be a good servant, it's a bad master, and I threw it away without a second thought in favor of an invaluable experience.

My walking/running habit suffered a similar setback this trip.  Travel is great, but very hard on carefully, painstakingly built habits.  I gave myself four days of recovery once we returned, and there is still much that needs to be done before I can say we're settled back in.  But today is the deadline I've given myself for restarting my DuoLingo, exercise, and some other formerly-regular habits.  It's a small step, but if I succeed, it will be the soonest I've ever recovered from a trip.

The burden of important projects that have been neglected since before Thanksgiving (many of them for much longer than that) is likewise weighing heavily on me.  Travel is fun, and more importantly travel is valuable—ten times more so when it means spending time with family and friends.  But if I'm going to continue to enjoy it, I need to be more deliberate in budgeting for project time when we are home.

Plus, for me, the larger part of the travel iceberg lies below the surface:  the processing and writing time.  Not to mention over 1600 photos to sort, evaluate, and organize.

Ganbarimasu!

On January 28, 2016, we were preparing to land at the end of our flight across the Atlantic from Paris to Newark, the penultimate leg of a journey home from the Gambia that had begun with a take-off from the emergency Space Shuttle landing site that serves as the Banjul Airport runway.

Thirty years ago, that same Atlantic received the shredded remains of the Challenger and all her crew.

What Reagan (and Noonan) knew, as did Winston Churchill, was how to inspire people to be better than themselves.  You don't make children learn more by telling them how stupid they are; you don't make people love others better by insisting they are racist, sexist pigs; you don't encourage the weak to become strong by pointing out their failures.

Nor do you regale them with how strong and smart they are, and insist "you can be anything you want to be."  You don't imply that success should be easy or that love doesn't require sacrifice.  You don't suggest that the best way to fight terrorism is to continue buying and selling as usual (President Bush after 9/11) or partying on (some Parisians after the recent attacks).

A good leader is not afraid to insist that there is no gain without risk, no success without effort, and no victory without battle.  The way is hard, the road is long, and it is not safe.  A great leader goes on to encourage others to believe that they are the kind of people who will rise to meet the challenges; that the benefits will be worth the cost; and that the way, though difficult, will be sprinkled with joy.

I try to avoid clickbait—you know, the Internet equivalent of the TV news teaser, "World ends tonight, details at 11"—but this one on Facebook mentioned both "Basel, Switzerland" and "drum corps" in the subtitle, so I succumbed.  I was glad I did.  (Thanks, BJ.)

The Top Secret Drum Corps founded the now-famous Basel Tattoo in 2006.  I enjoyed watching the parade in 2010, though we didn't attend the Tattoo itself, being fully entertained by newborn Joseph.

We didn't come nearly as far south as usual on our trip home from Connecticut, because we enjoyed a wonderful visit with my cousin, her husband, and other family members.  We hadn't seen each other since my Dad's memorial service in 2002, and only just scratched the surface of reminiscing and catching up.  We could have lingered longer over breakfast, but we needed to get going, and anyway, our hosts were dealing with a clogged kitchen sink.  It was a great visit, but it meant we were still nearly 850 miles from home.  We were thinking of stopping around Savannah, but ... things happened.

The trip began uneventfully, unless you count the good event—the trip from Washington, DC to Richmond has never been so easy.  Probably that's because we're usually hitting that stretch in the late afternoon, and this was morning.  No traffic problems at all!  But we made a gas stop in good old Walterboro, SC, and as we drove away the car door locks began randomly and repeatedly cycling:  lock, unlock; lock, unlock.  We tried this, we tried that.  We searched the Internet, where what we found most useful was learning that other people have had the same problem, though there was no consensus as to a solution.  I whined on Facebook, and received some replies that cheered us up, but no practical suggestions.  Our own mechanic had gone home for the day.

So we just kept going.  Instead of stopping in Savannah, we decided to go straight home, not knowing what might happen if we stopped the car and left it overnight.  There were some promising breaks in the lock cycling, but it would come back again.  And again.  Until finally it didn't.

Although we no longer had our Personal Percussion accompaniment, the I-4 stretch had enough to keep the driver awake:  a long construction zone, with no street lights and no lane markers, in the pitch dark and pouring rain.  At least the other folks on the road had the sense not to be driving the posted 70 mph speed limit.  But we made it to the grocery store, where the car locks behaved normally, for a few staples and some sushi for dinner—as I said, we hadn't wanted to stop the car while far from home.

And then we were home!  All seemed well, and we walked over to the neighbors' to pick up our mail.  There we discovered that both of them were sick in bed.  This is relevant to my tale because of what happened next:  Porter went to turn the water to the house back on, and discovered the valve was leaking—and who knows how long it had been.  He had the material needed to repack the valve, so instead of enjoying our sushi, he went to work.  Normal procedure would have been to borrow from our neighbor both his assistance and the tool needed to turn the water off at the street.  But ... (see above).  Not without difficulty, Porter managed to make do with me as an assistant and wrenches plus a lot of effort to turn the water off, then on again, then off again when we realized things were still leaking, then on again when the repair was finally complete.  Well, almost—we have water, and we've left the finishing touches for a time when, we hope, the "sun comes out and dries up all the rain."  So the day that began with plumbing, ended with plumbing.

Oh, and we also replaced the battery in one of our smoke detectors, which was beeping so insistently I could hear it from outside the house.

We may be getting to bed a lot later than we had hoped, but we're home, we're thankful for a wonderful vacation and a safe return, and we trust that daylight will reveal no further problems—our neighbors keep a good eye on things while we are gone—and we finally had a chance to enjoy our sushi.  Soon we will be off to bed, after I write one more post....

The one good thing about living so far from our grandchildren is that their growth between visits is often dramatic, and easier to see than when one's data points are closer together.  But Nathaniel, six months old, certainly made the most of our two weeks together.  When he arrived, he was a good crawler (commando-style), but had just begun to take some wobbly creeping (hands-and-knees) steps.

Before the second week was out, he had a good, solid, cross-pattern creep, i.e. was able to get across the room and into trouble in no time at all.  And never one to rest on his laurels, Nathaniel wants to cruise!

So, it's "quiet time" here with the Swiss contingent.  Vivienne and Daniel have worn themselves out and are now asleep.  Joseph spent the first half hour reading out loud from the Bible:  New International Version, starting in Ruth, ending in Revelation, and skipping all around in between.  Now he has a spray bottle and a cloth and is cleaning up streaks on the glass doors to the balcony.  Janet has followed the lead of the younger ones, but I'm enjoying the sun, the cool breeze, and a moment of quiet (maugre the barking dog, the nearby airfield, and the heavy contruction noise).

Side notes:

• The time stamp should now be right for my posts.  I hadn't bothered to change the time zone in LifeType, but finally decided it seemed too silly to write about the afternoon with an early morning timestamp.
• I can't decide whether to be pleased or annoyed that Google thinks it's smarter than I am.  It looks at my IP address and decides to deal with me in German....

I don't know what caused our homeward flight to be delayed five hours.  It certainly wasn't the weather, which could hardly have been better for March in New Hampshire.  The Southwest Airlines agent said the delay was due to maintenance, but I suspect that any "maintenance" that so disrupts the flight schedule is more along the lines of "repair."

Whatever the cause, at about 2 p.m. we discovered that our 5:30 flight had been rescheduled for 10:30, with the estimated time of arrival in Orlando moved from a very reasonable 8:45 to a very unreasonable 1:45 a.m.  Unreasonable, that is, if your ride home from the airport has to get up early to go to work.  We looked into alternate flights, but none was direct, and their arrival times into Orlando weren't all that much better.  We chose to stay in a situation where if the flight were cancelled the onus was on Southwest to make other arrangements.  Porter reserved a rental car instead (there are return places for both Hertz and Avis near our home, which makes this a convenient option), and we settled down to enjoy a little more time with the grandkids.

Not all that much time, as it turned out, because in order to fit our new departure into the Daleys' busy schedule, we had to leave home sooner than strictly necessary.  There was a bit of a question just who would drive us there, as Jon had been called out on an ambulance run, but he made it back just in time.  The rest of the family stayed home, so there would be plenty of room in the car on the way home for a large load of pellets for the woodstove, but Heather insisted that Jeremiah come, even though he had to be awakened from his nap.  I'm sure it was a good decision to let him say goodbye to us at the airport, because at barely two I'm sure he was shocked enough this morning to find us gone.

At the Manchester airport, our flight was famous.  They kept one restaurant open well past the normal closing time, so we were able to eat a late dinner while passing the long hours of waiting.  The food wasn't great but it was more than we had expected, and we were grateful.  Pretty much, if we saw anyone there who wasn't an employee, he was on our flight.  Thus after dinner we were able to settle ourselves some way away from the gate (but within eyeshot), and know that we would not be left behind.  In fact, the Southwest agent came to us (and the others scattered around) to deliver our two $100 vouchers "for the inconvenience."  True, it was inconvenient, but for two adults with no travel deadline it could not be called onerous.  (I did keep imagining what it would have been like if we had been travelling with three children under four, as Janet and I had done in the summer.)  We settled into a set of comfortable seats with charging stations for two phone and two computers.  We were warm and safe; we knew our plane was now in the air and on its way to Manchester; we had work to do and books to read, in peace and relative quiet.  Some people might pay a lot for that privilege....

We took off just before 10 o'clock, and all went smoothly with the flight, our subsequent retrieval of luggage, the rental car, and the ride home (none of which should ever be taken for granted).  It's times like this when I'm reminded that one of the blessings that came from Porter's years on the road for IBM was a great familiarity with the whole car rental procedure.  Even so, this one took some getting used to:  it had no keys.  Well, it did, but we didn't find them until later, tucked away in a compartment.  The only instructions were "depress the brake and press the start button."  Figuring out how to turn off the radio was also a trick.  Eventually he knew enough about the car to drive it home, but our first computer was less complicated.

We arrived home somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 a.m.  Everything was fine except for the clocks, which all insisted it was an hour earlier.

Today Porter is digging his way through Central Florida's surest sign of spring:  mountains of fallen leaves, and the trees still shedding.  When he is no longer in danger of falling off the screened enclosure into the pool (best-case falling scenario), I will venture out again to replenish the neglected larder.

Our feelings for Southwest Airlines were not of the rosiest when we learned of the long flight delay, but I was impressed by their efforts to make it up to us:  not only did the vouchers sweeten the situation, but the cheerful good humor of all the staff was contagious.  It's still my favorite airline.

95 by 65 #38 (5 new restaurants, #2) and #48 (visit King Arthur Flour):  Two flies with one swat.  (This European expression is much more to my liking than our own, as outside of dinner I see little reason to kill birds.  I have no such compunctions about flies.)

Our visit to the King Arthur Flour store, bakery, and café was Part I of our pre-Nathaniel-birth adventuring.  (Part II, which contributed to #69, will be the subject of a later post.)  KAF's products are good, though not inexpensive, and I loved getting a chance to visit their home turf.  Even more, I loved that the employees were so friendly and generous, especially since their generosity came out of their own pockets:  KAF is 100% employee-owned.

The food?  I had a bite of Noah's sandwich, which was wonderful, but for myself had ordered a simple half-baguette.  If you're taste-testing a bakery, you don't want to clutter up the basics with other flavors.  My verdict?  They do sell great bread in America, even if you'd never know it from the grocery stores and most restaurants.  The café is also not inexpensive, so maybe it's a good thing we don't live close enough to eat there on a weekly basis.  The temptation would be great.

I also enjoyed browsing the store, though I surprised myself by not buying anything.  If I get another chance to visit the store, I'll be more prepared with a plan—and more suitcase room.  There's just too much to choose from, especially with five kids anxious to get to the next stop on our adventure.  In the meantime, there's always mail-order.  And learning to make my own good bread.

The Battle of Kings Mountain was, like that of nearby Cowpens, decisive in turning the tide of the American Revolution in the South.  Not that I was ever taught that in any history class in school, where local prejudice made the Battle of Saratoga the only "turning point of the American Revolution."  But better half a century late than never:  I know it now, and we visited both Kings Mountain and Cowpens on one of South Carolina's most beautiful ever November days.

Another point of major importance that I never knew:  in the South, the Revolution was actually a civil war.  Having been brought up in the Northeast, I never thought of Tories as being all that important:  the Revolution was a battle between patriotic Americans and their nasty British overlords.  But in this part of the land the fight was brother against brother, or at least neighbor against neighbor, with loyalties somewhat fluid, and more about personal freedom than politics and breakfast beverages.  The British did their best to encourage the Loyalist faction (Tories) against the Patriots (Whigs), much as we keep trying to do in other countries today.  They'd hoped to get the Americans to do most of the dirty work for them, remaining themselves in more of a leadership and advisory position.  (Not much has changed in 234 years.)  At Kings Mountain, the officer in charge of recruiting and leading the Loyalists was Patrick Ferguson. (More)

Many thanks to our friend RW, who alerted us to this Wall Street Journal article about a wine-tasting bicycle journey through the Wallis in Switzerland.  The timing was perfect, because that's the part of Switzerland we had the privilege of visiting while waiting for Daniel to make his entrance.  Janet wrote some about the trip here, and I hope to post my own memories soon—before I forget more than I already have.  In the meantime you can get some of the flavor of the canton (though, not, alas, the wines) through the article.

I have a correction to make, however.

And the Matterhorn delivers—as long as you don't mind seeing it with the crowds through the clouds.

And this is what Switzerland should say to New Zealand:

In a letter to his son, J.R.R. Tolkien claimed that a visit to the Upper Valais [Wallis in French] and neighboring Lauterbrunnen Valley inspired the Elven outpost of Rivendell in his books.

Having visited both the Wallis and Lauterbrunnen, I can now claim to have been not only to Middle Earth, but to Rivendell itself.  The Shire, however, I expect I'll have to find on a trip to England.

For most of his journey, the author rode what's called an e-bike:  not, as I originally thought, some sort of virtual tour, but a modestly-powered bicycle that "helps me on the climbs yet is easy enough to carry on the train."  That sounds like a brilliant invention for climbs that even Steven Perezluha might find daunting, or maybe even for weary, out-of-shape mothers who would appreciate a little help trying to keep up on family bike trips.

This journey was about wine, and ours was not, but the article captures the feel of the area so well it was pure delight to read.  You might enjoy it, too, for a little glimpse of what we saw this summer.  Of course, the article neglects to mention the mountain pass with frequent, hair-raising switchbacks, driving rain and hail, two carsick kids, and a woman threatening to go into labor.  For that, you'll have to wait for my version.