travel tales

Posted on episode 286

Travel Tuesday: Magic Kingdom-ish

I’ve been a terrible daily blogger, but if you read my previous post a little over a week ago you already know that I just spent the last two weeks in Florida.

We’re home.

Fifteen hours in transit yesterday. Two flights. Three airports. Two COVID-19 tests. Virtually no food (thanks to supply chain troubles at the airports.) And a couple hours of jet lag, to top it all off.

Ahhhh … remind me again why I missed travelling so much?

I joke.

Mostly.

Traveling during a pandemic was a choice we made late last month with very heavy hearts. I don’t want to appear cavalier about it. We didn’t know even up until the departure morning when we woke up at 4am and got on the plane southbound that we were still going. We had a bailout plan right until the Orlando flight boarded. Ultimately came down to balancing personal risk, losing a lot of money if we cancelled, and setting some lowered expectations around the trip activities overall.

But. I have just spent the last two weeks wearing a medical grade N95 mask every time (no, every time) I was in public … and oh boy, were we ever in public. My face is chapped. My hands are raw from sanitizer. My mind is blurry from cognitive dissonance of immersing myself in that for so long and then coming back to almost-lockdown locally at home. I’m not sure I want to turn this post or blog into a rant about the mixed narratives being woven in Florida (and Disney World itself to be honest) about the severity of the pandemic, personal accountability, a culture of individual liberty, and the politicization of health care, but I just Jungle Cruised through the epicenter of pandemic insanity and survived to tell the tale.

I feel like I could write a few things worth reading.

At the core of our vacation, however, was doing the right things in the middle of the big wrong one. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, even having tested negative and made it home sans COVID, I think we probably should have cancelled. But we made a hundred choices each day about masks, touching surfaces, where to eat, how to transport from hotel to park and back again, when to be around other people, and when to pull the ripcord and just go back to the isolation of the hotel no matter how much fun it seemed like we were missing.

I’m going to let it all settle in a bit first, and over the next days and weeks I’ll likely write a lot about the recent travel experiences and opinions before getting back into the food and cast iron posts.

I had these dreams of writing great missives about our adventures directly from Florida, but in the blur of everything else, the days filled with theme parks and food and sketching (I did do a lot of sketching) sitting down to blog about it all just … fell by the wayside.

Plus, announcing that I wasn’t at home online didn’t seem like the smartest choice for many reasons including both home security and seeming to flout restrictions.

Posted on episode 285

Turtle Power

Sunday runday and on my solo five klick shakeout I paused beside path to watch a turtle the size of a football basking in Florida sunshine.

Also, it was nearly fifty degrees celsius warmer than the last time I ran oudoors a little more than a week ago. I haven’t been that sweaty from running five kilometers since the heat of last summer. I could have taken a dip beside that turtle and …

The runaway train of vacation planning never actually found a means of slamming on the brakes and the next thing I knew I was boarding an international flight to Orlando with my face wrapped tightly in a N95 surgical respirator and wondering, sometimes aloud, at the bounds of my own sanity.

Back in the summer, when all things virus had seemed to be packing its bags and getting ready to move out of the basement like all uninvited houseguest should eventually do, we registered in a series of Disney World Marathon run events.

Then we eagerly booked a vacation around that … and waited.

It all went great from there, right? Well … no. We watched anxiously as a viral variant named Omicron washed a new wave of panic all across the world. Triple-vaccinated and packing a smuggler’s haul worth of PPE, we warily tracked the news and tripped over ourselves justifying taking the trip versus the stupidly high costs of cancelling it and just wallowing in pity at ourselves from the safety of our frozen house. A dozen times we came a turtle’s breath away from calling the whole thing off, swallowing the thousands of dollars of lost travel spends, and buying a big bottle of bubbly for new years eve to forget the whole thing and …

And.

And yet, here we are.

And here I am on a Sunday morning, looking out at a resort swimming pool after a five klick shakeout run, sipping a six dollar cup of takeway coffee, having spent the last four days wandering through the densely packed, pandemic-oblivious theme parks of Disney World and giving myself blisters and aches and pains and overwhelming anxiety and exhaustion in the process.

There are a number of smooth and flat walking trails just out the front door of our hotel, winding around lagoons and restaurants and wire-suspended gondolas, leading into and around and between Epcot and a make-believe Star Wars lands. As thousands of racers congregate here over the next few days for races starting later this week, I saw dozens of fellow runners out on the boardwalks and asphalts. I even saw some of the race crew flagging locations for aid stations and mile markers and marshalling points.

We have a couple days to cool off. A few more days of park-hopping and pool lounging. We pick up our race packages mid-week and run before the weekend starts in earnest. I’m wondering how I’m going to tackle a half marathon I didn’t really train for, on which I’m banking on residual fitness and sheer determination, plodding along at a turtle’s pace to finish the thing on pure willpower.

This morning on my tour of the hotel trails, weaving around families walking towards the park gates, and as I trotted by wearing my 2014 Disney Half Marathon running shirt, one of the race setup workers looked up, pointed and snapped a photo of me from his phone. I smiled. It was probably the only time I’ve been out in public this week without a mask so it took a moment to remember how. I guess if you see a sweaty forty-something guy smirking akwardly on the runDisney socials this week … maybe it’s me?

Or maybe I should have posed with my new friend the turtle. I’d bet we have more in common these days than we realize.

Posted on episode 279

Travel-less

What did you want this year
… but not get?

If all goes well my travel-happy soul will find some relief in the near future, but if you are like me the one thing you probably didn’t get last year was a ride on a plane.

The last time I flew anywhere was a few months before the pandemic locked down the world, and as we zoomed over a surprisingly blue-skied Greenland I snapped some teasing photos of the snowy, iceberg covered landscape below.

Hopefully the story of 2022 is a little less grounded … for all of us who live to wander.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 271

Words on Sketching

Learning by doing.

It can work, but at some point a guy needs to look to some other sources for guidance and advice. Like, say… a book (or ten.)

What was the best anything that you read in 2021?

As much as I’ve taken to the internets this past year in an attempt to hone my sketching technique, watching videos and reading forums, what has been most useful is the small but growing collection of art instruction books that I have in my personal library.

Books on figure drawing. Books on perspective art. Books on comics. Books on general drawing skills and books with very specific topics for very specific art-ish subjects. Even some new books I’ve picked up the past few months about urban sketching have found a place on my nightstand where I peruse them before bed many nights.

Are they deep literature and mind-expanding novels? No.

Are they reading material to take on a vacation or to relax with? Not exactly.

Are they something I would recommend? If you are interested in sketching, of course.

As with many things worth learning there is usually a book about it.

Not every subject can be taught from a loaf of paper, but I’ve found that sketching is one those subjects that can be enhanced by reading about it.

I think it has helped me.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.