Well, I finally did fly out of Sydney on February 27th, after that 7 hour delay. So I left Sydney at 10 pm, and I arrived at 4 pm of that same day (I can’t figure out if that somehow means I got younger…though it certainly doesn’t feel like it!) and my friend Lisa picked me up and drove me to her place in Delmar, near San Diego. I arrived in California to rain, but that did not spoil the view as we were having dinner right on the beach in Delmar, and in fact probably enhanced the nighttime drama of the roiling waves.
Lisa had bought tickets for a wonderful whale-watching trip on t
he America, a replica of the very first America’s Cup winner for Sunday, so we were very glad to wake up to bright sunshine. Still, the captain of the America warned us that the trip could be a bit rough, given the previous day’s storm, and rescinded their usual “no seasickness” guarantee, offering anyone their money back or a ticket for a future date. We decided to go ahead, and it was well worth it. We proved to be pretty good sailors, and just enjoyed the beauty of the sea, and the excitement of spotting whales. (There’s that woman in the hat again!).
Honest, if you look hard you will see a whale’s back in this picture (it was difficult to look at the sudden spouts of water that would
announce the presence of a whale, and get the camera ready for when one would plunge out of the water, while hanging onto a rope of a rocking boat trying to avoid dropping my camera into the middle of the Pacific).I flew to St. Louis on Monday, March 1, arriving very late in the evening. I picked up a rental car, and drove off to Russell Blvd, the same house where Diana and I lived in 2007, and where Diana still is living. It was so good to see her! She looks great, and is doing very well in her job at Saint Louis University here in St. Louis. She had just returned from a trip to Miami for a college fair and high school visits. An added treat for her was a visit from her cousin John, who lives in Orlando, who brought her brownies from her Aunt Mary Ellen to help celebrate her 26th birthday.
I took off for Atlanta then on March 5th for the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference. The conference was great…seeing people I’ve met before, meeting new people, going to interesting talks, having interesting chats. I found Atlanta somewhat impersonal – the downtown area we were staying in is virtually empty at night. A telling sign that no one lives in the vicinity is the set of loudspeakers blasting music outside of a nearby restaurant (and I mean blasting!)in the late evening and into the night. On the last day, I went to see the Martin Luther King Jr. national historic site. We couldn’t get into his house, as the numbers on each tour are very limited, but still it felt inspiring to see where he lived as he was growing up with his family, and to see his tomb. The museum I found impressive perhaps not least because it celebrates the life of Coretta Scott King as much as it does MLK. Then we went off to see a totally different world: that of Margaret Mitchell – the house where she lived when she wrote Gone with the Wind. We had a most interesting tour guide who would inject comments such as “I can’t forgive her for marrying Red Upshaw. So any of y’all who are single remember this: never marry an alcoholic”. That evening, we had a drink on the 70th floor of the Westin Hotel, which is reportedly the tallest hotel in the western hemisphere. It has a revolving bar/restaurant on the 70th floor, a fact that is good to have in mind when you get way up there. I was standing there, looking out the floor to ceiling windows at a rather breathtaking nighttime Atlanta spread out way down below, and thinking “I’m feeling dizzy! And I haven’t even had a drink yet!” when I realized that we actually were moving.
I arrived back in St. Louis on Wednesday, and have been working on the paper for the Conference on College Composition and Communication, in Louisville this week. Elisa arrives tomorrow (Monday) (yipeee!!) and she'll be going with me to the conference. We leave Tuesday (16th) and will be driving there...we come back to St. Louis on Saturday. So, another trip and another city!
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