Journey to the Center of the Awesome: Taking Washington

In the case of most major life events, I tend to make a concerted effort to sit down during (or shortly after) the thing and knock out a blog post to take full advantage of the fresh memories.  Home leave was one of those things I was hoping to document in great detail for our girls, but the six-week whirlwind ended up swallowing us whole, more or less...in a good way.  I actually wrote quite a bit while we were in the States, keeping my journal handy with me at all times, but in the course of events, my thoughts were too erratic and chaotic to turn into anything cohesive enough to publish.  Even in the following weeks and months, the thing just proved to be too big and muddling to do justice to...because I didn't want to simply deliver a dry report on the course of events, but putting to paper the way the whole thing made me feel was also too complicated to master.

So, four months later...while laying awake at 4am, thinking obsessively about cleaning the flat and organizing our effects in an effort to leave Vienna, I decided the time had come.  This was the exact moment--not another would pass without sitting down to tell our story:

Once upon a time, the four of us embarked on an adventure called: Home Leave. We'd been waiting for this day with anticipation for months.  We'd even purchased matching tiger shirts to travel in from the Vienna zoo.  Our bags were packed, packages were at our final destination waiting for us, the apartment was in tip-top shape, the taxi was at the curb to take us to the airport....and our children were on the sidewalk screaming as if someone were attempting to murder them.

Car seats.  The two of them hadn't ridden in a car seat in nearly eighteen months and the idea was apparently catastrophic.  But, as in all good adventures, our heroines conquered their fear, strapped into death seats for the twenty-minute ride, clinging to their mother's arms...we arrived at the airport.

And if getting to the airport from one's apartment proves to be the most difficult part of a 20+ hour journey, then I call it a success.  Done!  After a few piddling flights, we were on American soil again.  This was weird.  Very, very strange.  The reverse culture shock set in almost immediately...as three separate people in the San Francisco airport stopped us to ask if we needed directions to our next gate...in ENGLISH, no less.  The first thing I did was eat a salad with copious amounts of romaine lettuce and creamy caesar dressing as we waited for our next flight; there I was, chomping away, freezing to death in the foreign A/C, still balking at the kindness of the woman who had told me I dropped some change, before handing over a heap of napkins, reminding me to grab a fork and telling me to have a good day.  Hospitality was never so dizzying!

The flight from San Fransisco to Pasco couldn't have been shorter.  Up we went and back down we came with a short break for a beverage in between.  We got there so soon and shot off the plane in Pasco so quickly, that we even managed to surprise Karen, Gary and Elizabeth as we came through the glass doors in the deserted Pasco airport.  Lots of hugging ensued.  Then Jackie arrived bearing heaps of gifts dripping with tissue paper...and a wide-eyed baby girl who I'd never met before.  And there was more hugging and squealing.  Then we made our way down to find our luggage...and George walked through the doors....and there was more hugging and back-slapping.  It was great.  It was after midnight and we had been awake for over 24 hours, but we were just euphoric.  We even stayed up another hour or two, chatting off the adrenaline in the living room of John's parent's house.  Surreal and lovely.

That was the best I felt for the next week.

We slept great that first night...especially the girls, praise the Lord, but jetlag still wreaks havoc in a myriad of ways.  International travel is not a gentle event, so, I spent the next several days in a bit of a headache-filled, painful, fuzzy-brained haze.  I honestly feel sorry for everyone who came to visit those first days; I was so happy to see everyone.  So glad to be there...but The Willian was not really present.  My body does not do well with major changes and this trip was assaulting me from every possible angle.  Mostly, we just tried to get out into nature--to the river or the park. Nature grounds me, and the girls are happiest when there's a playground in view, so it was a win-win situation.

There was a lot of stuff that was giddily overwhelming; I walked around Target...on a SUNDAY...and was so overcome by the EVERYTHING that I forgot to buy the one thing I had gone there for. More importantly, though, during our two weeks in town we also got to visit some of our favorite mom and pop shops, even discovering a new taco joint, which we patronized practically every day they were open; I ate delicious overstuffed burritos for breakfast AND lunch nearly every day.  Not even joking. We even managed a trip to the farmer's market (be still, my heart!).

Not only were the things so overwhelming, but the people too.  So many great friends came over to see us and met up with us around town. Organizing a social calendar was dizzying and most of the time made me feel like an elitist jerk, but everything had to be scheduled.  It ended up being great.  Jackie and Nate threw an ungodly amount of beef on the Traeger and served up a barbecue that nearly made me cry.  The people...the food!  This incredible combination of being surrounded by people I adore while shoving amazing food in my face was just too much.  There was American football played live during normal waking hours, Bunco night, which was just filled to the brim with hysterical cackling from my favorite women...there were lets-meet-up-after-the-kids-are-in-bed nights filled with junk food, days spent on the farm with gaggles of children and girlfriends...and nights spent over a bottle of wine (or two) and PF Chang's take-out with my best friend.

And can I just mention THE BABIES!? First of all: these kids--the ones who used to be babies, but are now enormous, talking kids--they were supposed to stop growing while I was gone. And furthermore: who authorized all these new beautiful squishy babies and round gorgeous bellies?! The children--the growing families--they delivered the hardest slap of reality: life in the US did not and does not stop for us.  Life NO WHERE depends on us.  It just keeps going.  Forever. We were busy growing and changing in Vienna while the rest of the world followed suit.  It was different and exactly the same all at once.

Our last few days in the Pacific Northwest were pretty celebratory. We were in town for the infamouse annual sausage festival; this was fairly laughable to begin with since we had just left the land of sausage, but, A) these were so much better than Viennese wurstl, and, B) we were really just there to play games at the carnival.  The ratio of adults to children was so high, there were tickets coming out the wazoo.  We must have gone to every booth, twice, and ordered so much food there was nearly a whole funnel cake left over.  Even though it was meant to echo something vaguely Bavarian, that festival was so fantastically American.

On the heels of this, we started gathering our effects again and getting things piled into the Horne's 15-passenger van to prepare for an epic family trip across the state to Seattle.  Because there's a major airport there...but mostly because: BASEBALL.  That word crossed our lips so many times over the past 18 months in Vienna.  The most homesick I had ever felt was walking past the practice fields in Vienna while a baseball game was being played.  The sound of the bat cracking, the chatter...it's just HOME.  Baseball is America's game and, by God, we were going to see the Mariner's play.  This is why we found ourselves lumped together in a giant van on our way to the Emerald City.

I adore this drive.  The open steppe of the Tri-Cities can be picturesque, but nothing in this world beats the sight of MY TREES.  I'm convinced that, outside all normal reasons for living, those dense forests are one of the main reasons my heart beats.  On the way, we stopped to gape at Snoqualmie Falls; I got to stretch my legs and inhale the clean smell of decay that can only be found on a damp forest floor.  And then, before we knew it, we were in Seattle.  We stayed at a hotel out by the airport to make our transition to flight the next morning that much easier and took the light rail, for the first time, into the city. This was more our speed: public transportation.  It's what we do.  The ride was long, but eventually we were in the heart of the city, walking along the Sound, scouting for a place to grab a bowl of chowder.  Oh, chowder, how I missed you.  There was a great view from our seats in the restaurant out to the water; we watched ferries coming and going...and the new (where-the-hell-did-that-come-from?) ferris wheel turning round and round on the edge of the pier.  I remembered the last time we'd been to this restaurant, Audrey wasn't even born yet--just a wee bump, making me too sick to enjoy my fish.

We peeled ourselves out of our seats to start walking in the general direction of SAFECO field.  The new joke along the way became a guessing game called: "Homeless? Or native Seattleite?"  It was shockingly difficult to decipher whether the shaggy gal sitting on a duffel on the street was there by choice or not...but maybe that's just a way to even the playing field. Even given our leisurely pace we were early for the ball game, so we took our time shopping in the Seahawks/Sounders shop and picked up a few souvenirs for friends back in Vienna before meandering past the hot dog stands lining the road to SAFECO.

This was Audrey's third Mariner's game and Bailey's first; we had great seats on the bottom level along the first base line and settled in for a grand time.  Since this was one of the biggest events of the first leg of our trip, John and I had agreed in advance that the world would be our oyster at the ballgame: nine dollar beers, garlic fries, you name it.  Other people can keep their fancy dinner reservations with a dress code--I'll take unlimited ballpark food any day.

Here's the part where I would resoundingly announce that the whole experience was glorious, but I'd be lying.  The first half of the game was torture for me.  I had been fighting a really horrid headache all day and the night chill in the air that my jacket was insufficient to block was what finally undid me.  I was cold and in pain and miserable...until my meds finally kicked in, accompanied by a dose of caffeine, and just like that: BOOM.  BASEBALL!  I enjoyed the hell out of the last innings.  Audrey even showed me the way up to the highest seats and we ate chocolate and sprinkle-covered strawberries while taking in the whole stadium from on high.  It was a great night; it was Seattle; it was everything American and we got to share it, not just with the girls, but with the whole family.  Magic.

That long train ride back to the hotel proved that the day had worn us all down to the bone.  We shuffled from the station like zombies and slipped immediately into jammies, making sure everything was ready to go again at the crack of dawn. A few hours of hard, exhausted sleep was all that lay between us and the next leg of our journey.