Sunday, August 17, 2008

Smooth Sailing

I’ve been on solid ground for just over 37 hours and I can still feel the press and heave of gravity as the Norwegian Star swayed from side to side, an alternately uplifting and totally flooring phenomenon. I’ve been home for about four hours and, having unpacked, done some necessary maintenance on the cat box, and begun to fill myself in on everything I missed in the world while we were in another one entirely, I can’t believe how quickly I’ve settled back in and that temporary world – which was a complete and consuming and lovely reality, with its own routine and problems and solutions and decisions, for a whole week – has already become hardly more than a dream.

Our week in Snoqualmie/Seattle/Ketchikan/Juneau/Skagway/Prince Rupert was incredibly wet, often truly astounding and never completely awful. Thank goodness for my waterproof Olympus; I took 1,082 digital photographs (some of which will be discarded as duplicates, darks, or blurries) and three short videos, and I’ll try to post at least the most fabulous 300 images (because it’s a pain to upload any more than that to the gallery, but also because I’ve discovered that no matter how interested and fascinated most people are, they still have a limited attention span or just limited time), but it’s going to be so hard to choose.

It was so very nice to be so very gone for so very long, especially after I shut my cell phone off because the water plant SCADA computer called me out one night at 11:30 and after that I never thought about work again, although in Skagway I did think of texting T. and Robbie a photo, but that was because Brent was texting Katherine to ask which of his nieces collects snow globes (the 14-year-old) and which collects shot glasses (the 12-year-old).

The only everyday things I missed were Puck (of course), who was parked in Snoqualmie (and who has racked up just 10 miles shy of 10,500 miles after this trip and who got an astounding 37MPG on one leg of our journey and who got along just fine when Brent drove him), and the cats, who seem to have done fine without me but also seem pretty pleased to see me, prodding and purring, and who welcomed me home by flushing a hobo spider the size of a gopher out from under the kitchen table, where I spotted it and killed it with my plastic jelly shoe. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the flimsy, perforated slipper was only substantial enough to knock it unconscious, at which point I would have run for the ice pick.

And speaking of ice, just wait until you see the pictures. I’ll put them up this week while the memories and details are still fresh.

1 Comments:

Blogger mister anchovy said...

Sounds like a great trip...looking forward to your pics. I've spent a little time up around Prince Rupert and inland a little to Kitimat. It's really spectacular and wild country.

August 18, 2008 at 9:17 PM  

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