Monday was a good day, sun up to sun down.
After getting the kids to school, me and Emily explored the last section of the race course. It is a windy up and down mountain bike track that doesn't seem to be traversed very often.
We were running along Lost Lake trail and came to two trails that diverged in a yellow wood. One trail was wide and clear, the other trail was a single track, covered in debris and leaves.
We took the one less traveled, and that made all the difference.
We called it the Robert Frost trail.
(I know, that's cliche, but it was the exact image of the poem)
Later in the evening, we joined the Blacks for a ride in a cessna up and over the San Juan Islands.
We landed in Friday Harbor and had dinner, then flew back home to the babysitter.
Some of my favorite things:
-Being able to see both Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainer at the same time.
I love seeing Rainer. It's so volcanic and huge.
- Cracking jokes into the head sets. Because your voice is projected directly into everyone's ears, the jokes and quips are "on stage", and the timing and quality of the joke is concentrated. Among the four of us, there was a nonstop stream of comic banter to go with the oohing and aaahing.
-Seeing Jim perform a skill that I know he possesses, but I don't actually get to watch on the daily. It's been about 8 years since I was in a cockpit with him.
It's kind of surreal to watch your husband/second half do something highly technical that you rarely see them do. It's like he has a secret life that I don't know about.
- I told him to debrief his passengers, so he got his pilot-to-passenger voice on and debriefed us "...we expect a smooth ride, but you never know" (in which his voice went up an octave at the end, as pilots do. It cracked me up.)
(there's Baker)
(there's Rainier)
I don't even know why I bother taking pictures of mountains. It does not even look the same. But I just loved it so much.
Joe "flew" most of the time. It was fun listening to Jim instruct on the instruments and all that.
Just don't ever make me touch the yoke. I want nothing to do with that.
At one point Joe turned around to look at us, and I nervously told him to keep his eyes on the road. Ha ha. It was a joke...but not really.
We parked the plane by hand, then walked down the quaint streets of Friday Harbor to a restaurant by the water.
We flew home in the dark/dusk.
When we landed back in Bellingham, Jim was writing in the log book, and I remembered the days in Daytona when he was getting his commercial pilot's license. It was just him and me. No kids.
We hunkered through Hurricane Charley together on the kitchen floor.
At the end of the summer, I had to get back to Vegas to start a new school year at Basic. It took an extra month or so for him to finish getting the commercial license because of all the hurricanes that came through. You obviously can't do any flying during one of those.
In the Orlando airport, getting on the plane to take me to Vegas, we were both so sad. We didn't know how long it would be before we would see each other again. Weeks probably? But it was such a homesick, tearful goodbye. We were both crying.
I walked away through the security area, and the crying ensued at a more pitiful and lonely rate.
By the time I landed in Vegas and my roommate Dana picked me up, I couldn't see. If you wear contacts and you've cried lots while wearing them, you know what I mean. Everything was foggy. As soon as I retrieved my suitcase, I opened it right there by the carousel and fished out my saline, case, and glasses.
Jim finally finished his training (at one point having to move to a new apartment due to a hurricane collapsing the ceiling of the old apartment), and drove cross country with his dad.
I lived with Dana in her mom's house while I waited for Jim to finish.
The night he arrived in Vegas, I pulled up to our Timberlake Apartment (coming from somewhere? can't remember), and he was standing by his car waiting for me.
We kind of giggled and hugged and looked at each other. I remember it was so weird to see him there in the flesh. He looked like what he looked like in my mind at SUU before I knew him - back when I would pass him on the stairs to the ELC.
Anyway. It's strange how ethereal all those memories are, wisping around in the air - back when I couldn't set them in concrete with iPhone pictures and instagram.
Flying in a little airplane with an engine that sounds like a lawn mower made me harness some of those wisps of the past.
