Ready to be back home, we were on the road before 6 am and already two hours outside of Seattle before sunrise Sunday morning. Even earlier that morning, like a kid a Christmas, I found myself wide awake at 4: 30, an hour before the alarm was to go off, something that NEVER happens.
We're in a whirlwind of unpacking, dealing with the messes we left behind 3.5 weeks ago as we ran out the door, tackling the piles of paperwork that accumlated even in our absence, and madly entrenched in Halloween preparations.
I left the disc with our Panama pictures behind in Seattle, anyways, so there isn't a whole lot to share about that until it arrives in the mail. There are a handful of so-s0 pictures over at Flickr.
Time with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, neices, nephews, and step families was wonderful, the best, really. We got to be at one nephew's 3rd birthday party, we met our twin, 16 month old nephews for the first time, and spent a good amount of time with C's gramps who is in the early to mid stages of Alzheimers. Time with family is always good, however quirky we all are.
Some other highlights: Fishing, both in Panama and in Missouri. Swimming in the warm, salty, ocean water. Two trips to the fabulous St. Louis Zoo, and still we didn't see it all. Catching gorgeous fall color on both ends of the trip in Seattle, and a little of it in St. Louis. Spending the day in Seattle with C, just lollygagging and running errands together. Again, being with family.
A few low moments: E throwing up all over himself in the first 20 minutes of our flight out of Seattle (just when we thought we'd experienced all possible pitfalls of travelling with children. Apparently we were resting on our laurels, assuming it would be an easy trip this time.) Being too hot to even think, in English, let alone in Spanish, the entire first week in Panama, which made for two whiny children and one grumpy and anti-social Mama. E and I both catching colds during the last few days in Panama.
Each stop in our travels this time made for a bout of culture shock, at least on my part. It would only last for the first day or so and then I'd get over it for the most part. Perhaps the most shocking change of all was leaving Latin America and, hours later, finding ourselves plopped smack down in an average middle-class house on a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of the midwestern United States, the land of gingham sheets and monogrammed everything. It's always good to get out of the bubble that is the U.S., though, and come back with a new perspective, at least for a little while that is, until strip malls and SUVs and mega-markets and golf courses start, all to soon, seeming somehow "normal" again. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to readjust and reaquaint ourselves with the overabundance, overselection, and overconsumption.
Good to be back home in Montana...and to trade in linen and quick-drying microfiber for corduroy and wool. There's MUCH knitting to share.
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