Dad putting the final touches on his masterpieceHard to believe, but I’m writing this update from our living room in San Francisco, with our cat Nutmeg purring next to me on the couch and the faint aroma of sport celebrity still lingering in the air. (Barry, if you’re out there, couldn’t you have at least left us a signed baseball or something?!?) After a series of delayed/cancelled flights out of Lima to Miami, we finally arrived in Florida a few days ago, where we enjoyed a relaxing visit with my family that included my parents’ amazing homemade lasagna, welcome home cupcakes & balloons, marinated elk steaks, and of course, a few heated political “discussions” with my Dad. (It’s nice to have Dustin around to fight the liberal fight with me after having to go it alone against Dad all these years!) :)
Back home and loving itAnd then yesterday it was finally time to catch our 62nd and final flight home to San Francisco. Although the flight went off without a hitch, it was probably the most stressful one of our entire trip due to the presence of our agoraphobic feline traveling companion, Nutmeg, whom we were taking home with us after her year at my parents’ place in Florida. I’m not sure if Nutmeg or I was more stressed out on the flight, but let’s just say that both of us were incredibly happy to get her out of her tiny pet carrier and safely back home after the 12 hour door-to-door journey. Fortunately, she already seems to have forgotten the trauma of air travel, and while she does seem to be displaying a trace of wistful nostalgia for the lizards she once hunted down routinely on my parents’ screened-in porch, for the most part she already seems right at home.
Cat-travel stresses aside, when we arrived at SFO last night around 6:15pm (30 minutes early – talk about a first!), we texted our good friends Nathan and Christi, who had kindly offered to pick us up at the airport exactly 365 days after they had dropped us off there at the start of our trip. We should’ve guessed that something was a little fishy when Christi texted back and said she wasn’t going to be able to make it to the airport, but I suppose a year away from home had weakened our bullshit detection skills a little. We looked for Nathan at baggage claim, and right on schedule, he arrived with delicious homemade chocolate chip banana bread in hand from his wife Katy and a big welcoming smile on his face. After some quick remarks on each other’s new body size (Nathan looked much thinner due to a recent encounter with a nasty stomach bug, and we looked, well, the opposite after too many recent encounters with Argentinian steaks), we headed to the parking garage.
Nathan seemed to be having trouble remembering where he’d parked the car, and as we wandered in a serpentine fashion around the 3rd floor of the garage, I wondered if we’d ever make it home. He eventually found the car, and he popped the trunk to reveal, not an empty space for our luggage, but our friend Seth squished inside with a Doctor Seuss hat on and a boombox in his arms that started blasting “Born in the USA.” As Seth emerged from the trunk, strange creatures suddenly began to emerge from all different corners of the parking garage. There’s Count Chocula at 9 o’clock! There’s Hillary Clinton at 3 o’clock! Here comes stinky gorilla at 7 o’clock! Watch out, there’s Larry Bird at 6 o’clock! As we looked more closely at this odd hodgepodge of celebrities, we realized that we actually knew these strange parking garage creatures. Thanks to Nathan, Seth, Sarah, Ilan, Steph, Mike, Greg, and Christi, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a rockin’ airport garage Halloween welcome home dance party. If Nutmeg had been freaked out on the airplane, I have no idea what the poor thing was thinking as she heard the sounds of the Boss ricocheting off the cement walls of the garage and she watched a giant gorilla giving everyone big bear hugs. But she survived, and Dustin and I got the best welcome home party that Larry Bird has ever been involved in. :)
Our freak show welcome home crew. We love you guys!
And now, it’s back to real life (or realer life – technically we don’t have those job things yet), but we’re still planning to update the blog with all of the trip segments we’ve missed this year (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Patagonia, Galapagos) in the coming weeks. We’re not sure if any of you will see the need to keep reading about our international travels when you could just run into us at Target now, but we want to keep at it, if only to document the photos we took of these amazing places and to record some of the great experiences we had there. If nothing else, the world still needs to know what Israeli sausage toast is.
So, for those of you who are interested, stay tuned and keep reading. But more importantly, give us a call or stop by our place so we can catch up. We’ve missed you guys!!