Somewhere Out There

A look at our (Sonora & Lisa's) whereabouts the past 2+ months:

Five weeks in South Carolina (minus a short trip to VA)
One week in Virginia
Two weeks in California
One week in Maryland
Two weeks in South Carolina (And at this point we plan to meet up with Jon at a friend's house in VA Beach this weekend, then back to SC to let Sonora out of the car for a few days, then back to our dear old forgotten home in GA. And who knows how long we'll stay there?)

Excerpts from our travels.....

(This is when we flew from DC to CA.) Let me tell you a little bit about travelling by plane across the country by yourself with a 16 month old - It stinks..... literally. I wake up at 4:30 am, I get Sonora up at 5 am and load her directly into the car, all the while thinking that I am a genius for putting her to sleep in her travel clothes. I get on the interstate just after 5 am and I am in shock at the traffic into downtown Washington, DC. (We had been in VA visiting Jon and flew out from there.) But if I thought that bumper to bumper traffic was bad, I was in for another shock. The madness that awaited us at the airport was beyond description. Why would hordes of people from all walks of life and languages decide to fly out of the same airport before sunrise on a Wednesday morning, you ask. I still have no idea. It was pure madness and it was all I could do to keep a large bag, small child, stuffed to overflowing diaper bag, and breakfast, together and moving toward the ticket agent.

And then there was security. Did you know that even kids who can barely walk have to take their shoes off to run through the x-ray machine? Well now you do. Then they take us to the "special" section so that they can run laboratory tests on my child's juice bottle because she is likely gulping down explosive liquids. I know that they have to do those things and I am grateful that people are working to keep the skies safe. I just get frustrated when it seems like common scene has been lost among the regulations.

So after security we head to the bathroom to change Sonora's diaper so that she is good and fresh for the plane. We board immediately, take our seats, taxi down the runway and while we are still five planes back in line to take off, who should poop in their not 10 minute old diaper? Well it wasn't me or the man sitting beside us. So we have to wait to take off and until after the captain has turned off the "fasten seat belt" sign before I can freshen the atmosphere. Until that time the cabin was filled with a vile and unpleasant aroma emanating from our very own little princess. And have you ever tried to change a diaper in an airplane bathroom? Just stand a coffin upright in the back of a moving truck, shovel manure in the bottom so you get an authentic smell, then squeeze inside with a small live octopus and try to diaper it. By performing the aforementioned exercise you just might be able to relate to my diaper changing on an air plane experience. And lets not neglect the genius of an engineer who designed the airplane lavatory. He/She installed the tissue dispenser right above the head of the child having their diaper changed. So, before I could say, "Sonora, do not touch that!" She had pulled out 12 tissues and proceeded to shred them and throw the pieces in the air so that I felt like I was in the middle of a blizzard with zero visibility. And lest you think that the above story was our only dirty diaper on an airplane incident....it wasn't.

The best part of the whole trip was Sonora's religious experience. After we had been in the air a short while the pilot comes on over the loud speaker and in a deep voice, tells us our flight, info etc. When he was finished, Sonora shouts out as load and as passionately as she is able, "A-MEN.... A-men, Amen!" I tried to explain to her that it was only the pilot and not God who had spoken to us but she remained convinced that the Lord had spoken to us from on high and told us our cruising altitude and projected arrival time. "Amen, Mama....amen."

Then when we finally land in CA after the longest flight of my life, while waiting to disembark from the airplane, who should vomit all over three seats and a passenger? (Not Sonora, praise the Lord!) It was the little girl in front of us who had been playing with Sonora throughout the 5 hour flight - giving hugs, trading toys, stroking hair. And after she pukes her mother turns to her father and says, "I sure hope that this isn't the flu that you had the other day." Seriously!? Your kid is a petrie dish for the flu and you let her breathe all over my kid?! So now we are stuck in the back of a hot plane with the smell of vomit and you know who's recently dirtied diaper. It wasn't my fondest memory of our trip.

All in all Sonora was a trooper of a traveler, but even still, I have never been so happy to land somewhere in my life!

Lest you think that I am only full of gloom and doom, let me add that our time with Jon's family was so delightful that it made even the aforementioned trip worth it! Sonora loves her Grammie, Pop, Uncle Luke, Great Grandparents, myriad of second cousins, and her partners in crime - the dogs so much! We loved meeitng new friends and seeing old ones. We had a lot of fun and made some precious memories. And compared to getting out there, our trip back East was a breeze!