Last stop

Today I woke up surrounded by mountains with a dusting of snow on the peaks! Colorado Springs is a welcome last stop on my travels. I am tired of seeing concrete and cars, mile after mile of strip malls and close-ups of seat backs leaning towards me. I've been longing to go for a good walk - by the sea, across farmers' fields, in the hills...anywhere would do! So seeing the mountains is at least a start, and on a glorious sunny day that is very warm already at 10:30am.

This will be very short as a lovely older couple are coming to pick me up and welcome me into their home. I will meet with some friends of IFES tonight with them, and visit InterVarsity's Bear Trap Ranch this afternoon. Located at an elevation of 9,100 feet, last week it looked like this picture and I wouldn't have been able to go there:

This week, temperatures have become more like summer, so I will be able to visit the camp after all.

It's been a great trip. I've got to know some wonderful people, learned a lot about the people and organizations that support the charity I work for, and got to know the 'head honcho' in IFES a lot better. But I'm ready to come home - for all its flaws, the UK is where I want to live, and I miss the people, the 'backward' way of doing some things, the lack of glitz and shine, the ordinariness of life there. It will be good to be home.

Days Two, Three...I dunno I've lost count

Day two: Sitting in a lovely home overlooking a lake in East Grand Rapids. The trees here are just starting to turn, some lovely reds reflected in the water. I could stay here a while. Sadly, I'm off to Madison in less than an hour, so this will have to be brief.

The day has been very busy, starting with a breakfast meeting at 7:30 am, fortunately at our hosts house so I only needed to crawl upstairs toward the smell of coffee. Then a late morning meeting, which extended into lunch - more bbq was recommended when one of us asked for something very American. Is that all people eat here now? My memory is that it is more southern than northern, but Grand Rapids is certainly not the south! One meeting led to another, and we ended up visiting some great media people in the downtown area. Check out http://store.flannel.org/about-flannel for more details on their really interesting work. Their films have great potential for getting people to talk about important life issues. First class productions. Don't be put off by their rather drab About Us webpage! Free 'tickets' to watch the videos online are there on the Player page (Support) I think.

Day...four? Yesterday was Madison - got picked up at 7am and had meetings all day and evening. It is interesting travelling with my boss - in every meeting he is 'in charge' and I never know what part I am going to have to play - what he will ask me to talk about, which questions he will send my way. To be honest...I'm finding it rather fun! It is exhilirating to know that there is nothing I can do to prepare, and a great exercise to think on my feet. And the people I'm meeting are all great too. I could do this for a long time - if only we could do it in 8-hour days and not be flying to a new city every day.

Also interesting is travelling with two men. I am so used to being on my own, so used to having to be independent, to taking charge, being in charge because there is just me...that it is a real challenge to know how to relate to them in the flurry of airport activities, meetings, etc. The fact that they are both African adds an interesting cultural dimension. I expect they find me challenging too! I need more men in my life.

Random thoughts on America. I had forgotten how extravagently spacious everything is. Wide streets, miles and miles of shops and restaurants and parking lots with no sidewalk/pavement so you have to drive everywhere. Huge houses with front and side and back lawns all merging into their neighbours lawns. Gardens in these upper-middle class neighbourhoods with nary a flower - just shrubs clinging to the edges of houses. Acre upon acre of sprawling single-story businesses with great stretches of lawn around them - so lush and weed-free that I wonder - how many tons of chemicals are being poured onto them every month and where do those chemicals go, what is this passion for the perfect lawn doing to the environment?

Was driven to Eau Claire today - lovely fall colours beginning. Brings back memories of summers spent studying linguistics in North Dakota and taking forays camping into Minnesota and Wisconsin...several decades ago! One particularly memorable night was after watching the film An American Werewolf in London...lying awake listening to coyotes (or was it wolves???) howl all night and finding it hard to keep the images out of my mind. The power of film!

Well...lots more I could say but I should be asleep. Jet lag woke me at 4am this morning...let's hope I can sleep longer tonight.

Day 1

I woke up at 4:05am, 25 minutes before my alarm, and decided to let Petros (the Indonesian mouse who is currently a kind of a ‘mascot’ for the charity I work for) sleep while I got ready to head to the bus stop. Only time for a quick shower and a check that I really had packed everything – coffee would have to wait for the airport. Besides, adrenaline was running so who needs caffeine?

At that hour of the day there were no delays on the motorway, so I had lots of time to have a latte venti or venti latte or whatever the largest latte Starbucks makes is called, and the 2.5 hours till boarding time went relatively quickly. Note to those who travel - online it said that I had aisle seats, but when I checked in she said I did not. This has never happened to me before. Fortunately she was able to change them. Flight uneventful, but I don’t recommend the gluten-free option as the bread tasted like compressed sawdust. Not a bad option if you like tasteless apples (as well as sawdust), which seemed to be their substitute for sweet things.

First surprise was US customs, where I decided I should finally admit that I didn’t need my green card anymore as I didn’t live in the states and I had already exceeded the 1 year length of time when I could be absent from the US. “Why didn’t you surrender it when you left the United States?” I was asked brusquely. (I like the choice of words – surrender!). “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” I answered, whereupon I was finger-printed (all fingers, both hands, on a snazzy green-lit panel – no more black inky fingers!) and photographed, and marched off to the dreaded ‘back room’. There I was told to sit and wait with various other nefarious characters most of whom seemed to be trying to sneak into the US. I know this because I was the only person in there at first, and all these people came after me and got seen first – a tactic they use I’m sure to increase the feeling that I had done something very, very wrong and should be very, very worried. Fortunately, I ended up being interviewed by a nice customs man, who told me that I had a choice of either abandoning my green card (another nice choice of words!) or going to court, and that if I chose to abandon it I could have a new one should I ever decide to live in the states again, whereas if I went to court it would basically be seen as an act of aggression as far as I could tell. Furthermore, abandoning it would only take about half an hour of being interviewed and filling in paperwork, versus...well...I didn’t get him to give me all the details of the time it would take to go to court!

The rest of the time went comparatively well, with a 2-hour delay in Detroit airport, where there is nothing to do. By this time I had been on the move for about 16 hours after only 5 hours sleep, so I didn’t really want to do much, except lie down which was not possible due to the arm rests on the seat/benches, no doubt designed to keep people from lying down. The good news is that they fixed the problem with the brakes that caused the delay, and I arrived in Memphis to a warm if humid evening, and a chance to stand outside the locked gates of Graceland and have my picture taken by some obliging Canadians (obliging Canadians being a bit of a tautology I suppose!). Petros, the IFES ‘mascot’ and I then took a pink stretch limo to a nearby restaurant known for bbq ribs. I had an enormous mound of pulled pork (very tender strips of pork in bbq sauce) and home-made molasses baked beans and cole slaw, for something like 6 pounds. The limo was free (well, $1 tip each way) and although the restaurant was only a mile or so away, it was down one of those typical roads in the US where there is sometimes sidewalk/pavement and sometimes not, and most of the stores were closed and it was getting dark, and I wasn’t sure about the neighbourhood, so...why not go in a pink limo?!

On a more serious note – I’m here to keep in touch with donors to the charity I work for. The first meeting with the board of a ‘trust’ went really well – I really enjoyed meeting the people and chatting about the charity. A great break from computer work, but also it is good to see that the proposals and reports I write really do have an impact on those who read them!!

Now we are sitting in one of the board rooms with some time before we are driven to the airport. Next stop, Grand Rapids. Will try to keep blogging, should time and internet connections allow.