The Buried Book (book review)

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Into the Wild (book review)

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Seattle? Or Paris?

My first trip to Seattle matched all the stories I had heard.

Beautiful!
Perfect weather!
Coffee shoppes everywhere!
Great food!
Amazing animals and nature!
Eclectic!
Clean!

So as I wandered about the somewhat Old World type of streets, dashing into a wee eatery for an amazing breakfast burrito, I ask myself why I had not bothered with the northwest previously. It was so gorgeous both in beauty and weather, not to mention the landscape I saw flying in.

Then I remembered the question that always popped into my mind when I grimaced at the $800-1000 plane tickets.

"Why would I do that when I go to Paris for less?"

Well, there we are. Unfortunately, the conundrum will be even worse because now it's no longer a guess, but a reality that Seattle is very cool too. Decisions, decisions.

The Trials of Holiday Time

First, let me share a story of the ludicrous; a story that caused this post in the first place.

Eric flies out, on average, three times month to clients and conferences. I travel, on average, once a month, although driving is more common because I typically drop off the wee one to my parents (or meet them), or even bring her with me to wherever I'm going depending on the situation. While we typically try to take advantage of opportunities to bring us together, however, we missed this one. 

Eric was flying to Hartford CT and I was flying to Seattle on the same day. We were happy enough to be out the same day, but then we both commented that we're going through Chicago ORD. Really! Time passes and Eric noted how funny it would be if we accidentally ended up on the same flight. How ludicrous! What's your flight time? 423. Oh! Knowing that I flew in the afternoon too, and also knowing that regional Asheville is unlikely to support the typical bajillion afternoon flights, we wondered. Time passes. Hey, let's check that out. Sure enough, we're on the same flight! Let's get our seats together .... oh wait, never mind, we our already picked seats (Eric, 1A - me, 1B) are next to each other. Wow. Sad. Even sadder? The lack of enough curiosity to check each time we wondered.

This is extremely rare though. Keep in mind that even when travel internationally, it is a rarity that we're flying together. He'll be going to a client and I'll come later, or he'll have to leave earlier, or it simply doesn't work out. We are super excited about this silly 1.5 hours together on the same plane. We are giggling like school children at the airport, and everybody looks at us and goes "awwww". We plan carefully our conversation. What should we talk about? Work? Career? Family? This is heavy stuff. We only have 1.5 hours and we need to create an agenda. Oh! Holiday time. Let's focus on our next vacation. OK. Got it. Let's go get a drink now. We'll start talking about vacations on takeoff.

Takeoff.

So, where do we want to go on vacation? Eric has two weeks left ... I can do whatever I want with some planning. Mexico? Good grief no. I want to live. Caribbean. Bleh, sounds boring, but I'll consider the Fiji Islands. Why? ...that's so far!! Back to Europe? The first thing that both of us think about is the travel to get there and then lots of walking. Oh, how about Alaska? No! I'm doing that with my drive up there already next summer. Ohh.....I've always wanted to go down to Patagonia....let's do that. Um, I'll be in Rio waiting, you enjoy sitting on a glacier. I'm insulted. Glaciers rock. How about Thailand. I'm told all there is to do is to eat, sit on beaches, or do a sex tour. Eric seems a little motivated about the sex tour; I glare at him and announce sitting on beaches boring. Thailand is booted. 

In fact, as we tore apart the world in the first 30 minutes, I realised something; we were seriously considered massively beautiful areas of the globe, and we went "meh" on all of them. That seemed to be a strong indicator that our biggest issue was that we did not want to get on yet another plane. Or drive yet another long trip .... not soon at least. After all, I still have New Orleans, Colorado, and Arizona to visit through November 9 already. Eric has a much longer list. Perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way.

Why don't we take a good chunk of your holiday time and tackle some serious projects in the house that we'll never do unless we hire it out or ... take significant time off?

It's weird how fast that resonated. While the next 30 minutes was spent selecting and maximising the efficiency of which projects we'll handle, it has been decided.

10 days off over the Thanksgiving period completed dedicated to serious project work (wine room, under the porch room, the creek bank) is our official expenditure of Eric's remaining holiday time (leaving some time for a couple long weekends. To maintain the spirit of things, we are planning on hitting a new popular restaurant in Asheville each night. 

Improvement + Exploration :)