It’s been many days, hundreds of miles driven and many thousands of miles flown since I last updated. My journey back to the US before Christmas was a long and quite stressful journey. It started on a Saturday afternoon with a 5hr drive to Napoli for my 6:40am flight on Sunday. Finding a gas station that would take my company card at 5am was quite an experience. I should have known that having a big red fire truck parked next to my plane with a bunch of guys pointing at the wings was a sign of how the next few days were going to be.
I missed my connection in Munich like thousands of other people. I tried going standby on a flight to Chicago and it took me over an hr to even get on the list. After that I somehow managed to get on standby for a flight to Newark which I somehow got on, and I got a business class seat too. I arrived in Newark sans bags (they would take almost 10 days to get to Seattle...) Waited in line for a long time before I finally got a hotel voucher, not that I actually slept in the hotel since I was rebooked on a 6am flight through Dulles to Seattle. When I finally arrived in Seattle I had been traveling for about 53 hours, I was still wearing the same clothes from when I left work on Saturday and I hadn’t really slept in 2 days.
The next 3 weeks I was actually able to be home in Seattle and live a somewhat normal life – although for much of the time everyone was either away for the holidays or working. It was pretty weird at first being back in Seattle since I hadn’t been „home" in about 3 months. I had been sorta keeping in contact with most of my friends and I knew that everyone had lives and would move on. I guess I just hadn’t expected how much people had moved on and continued with their lives. Consequently, one of the things my job has taught me is to not worry about the what if’s and to just live in the here and now. My time off is usually quite limited and there just isn’t enough time to worry about what if’s and general bullshit. If anything, my time away have made me realize that there are certain people who I always make it a point to hang out with and then... there is everyone else. I’ve also come to the conclusion that 3 weeks is entirely too much time for me to take off all at once. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy a vacation as much as the next but after being on the road for so long I had just been so used to always being busy and then to all of a sudden not have any set plans... well that took some getting used to.
A few highlights of my time in Seattle were in no particular order – Chicken Teriyaki, New Years Eve, Stevens Pass, Christmas, Buenos Aires Grill. Now here are a few pictures of what I’ve come back to in Italy.
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