Joanna & Matt's Travels, in Way Too Much Detail

Ribbon pipefish (several)

Matt and I had a mini-vacation earlier this week, to Tampa, Florida. Grandparents watched the kiddos here, so it was a real break. Car rides there and back were thoroughly uneventful, thankfully safe, and awfully long (about 11 hours each). Matt and I were really only able to do one thing together, to go to the Salvadore Dali museum. I don't believe I've been to a one-artist museum before, and while our tour was informative it seems it would be difficult to work there ("Enough, already, with the Dali-this and Dali-that." "Oh, we're getting a new exhibit? Great! Oh wait…"). This is the largest collection of his art outside of Spain, and the couple who owned the collection willed it to the public, but only on the condition that the whole collection be kept together. Since no regular museum wants or can house that large a collection from just one artist, he got his own.

I did a little exploring the next day, while Matt was in conference all day long. I spent the morning at the Florida Aquarium, checking out sharks and rays and grouper. I love aquariums (aquaria? Note to self: look up), maybe because there's such cool stuff but it's all silent. On this particular day, it was not too crowded and even the kids who were there, were pretty quiet. That afternoon I visited a large public library and spent the entire time listening to a mental health-challenged gentleman who appeared to be homeless, cursing at the copy machine. I mean, I think I did. I saw the guy, definitely, when I came in. Then I kept hearing him cursing and yelling about something that had taken his money ("*(%^ took my ^&%$ money"), which I assumed was the copier. But every time I turned around, I never saw him, or whatever he was so upset about. I guess the obvious explanation is that it was around the corner of a bookcase and simply out of my view, but I swear it sounded really close and I kept expecting it and him to just be there, right behind me. Maybe he's not the only mental health-challenged one on the block. I was exhausted from doing a lot of walking in the sunshine - turns out the transit map our Sunday-night hosts gave us was about 5 years old and many things have been reconfigured. So I stopped for a couple of nice cold beers at this sports bar that was conveniently right across the street from where I was waiting for the streetcar. And I'm sure all the walking was probably good for me - we had a lot of delicious, but not at all healthy, food while we were there. The next morning was the last half-day of the conference, so I just hung out for a couple of hours at this coffee shop I'd noticed the day before.

Before we had Simon, Matt and I did a fair amount of traveling, usually to a big city we'd never been to before, in order to explore and sightsee. We've done: Boston, New York City, Chicago, Denver, San Diego, San Francisco, London and Paris. We visited Baltimore several times while we lived in Washington DC, and we stayed a weekend at … not Cape Cod, but somewhere on the coast. Gloucester? Parents of a friend had a cute little cabin where we spent our anniversary weekend one year. We've been to probably a couple of dozen museums (fave: American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore) together, and have lots of postcards, magnets and books at home to remind us. In the cities that had one, we hit all the aquariums (fave: New England Aquarium in Boston).

Our trip to Boston was in mid-November, and that represents to me not only the worst idea that I as an individual have had, but quite possibly the worst idea any human being has ever had, in the history of thought. Walking from our hotel room to (some big-deal cemetery) was the coldest I've ever been in my life - the sun was shining bright but the wind off the harbor was wicked. Fortunately at some point we finally turned a corner and it wasn't right in our faces. 

This trip was also the source of a recurring joke for Matt and me, about my exceptional sense of direction and map skills and his non-existent ones. For some reason we'd had difficulty in getting to Faneuil Hall in the evening, and once we were there I made the suggestion that we just go back to our hotel the same way we'd come, to avoid confusion. Matt insisted there was a better way (which I'm sure there was, but his was not it) and we just kept walking and kept walking and I kept saying, this is not right, where are we going? Finally we came to a bridge, and I think Matt was ready to set out across it, and I finally called an end to it. A bridge, really? Yes, really. Turns out once we passed up on the bridge, we soon found some landmark that let us know we weren't too far away. But good grief. So to this day, "Why don't we just go back the way we came?" induces great giggling, especially for me. 

We want to raise the boys to be at least semi-worldly young men, and I hope once they are both a little older we are able to do a little more traveling, even some international trips if the budget allows. I definitely want to walk around New York City with them. Poor Simon rode the Metro everywhere, and museum-hopped like crazy with stay-at-home dad Matt, but that was all before he turned one. I wrote about my traveling-with-child-with-special-needs anxieties in an earlier post ("We're Going to India! Or Maybe Not!") from a few months back. We don't know what church we may be appointed to in the future, and this rural appointment has been good for us, but I would like to be back in a city. Here in the western half of NC, that would mean Charlotte or the Triad (Greensboro/High Point/Winston-Salem). We lived in the Charlotte for a few years, when we met and first married, and my sister's in High Point and my dad about an hour from there. One of my missions as a parent is to make sure they learn and live one of my mom's mom-isms: "There are as many ways to live as there are people in the world." To which I would add, there are as many ways to live/eat/dress/worship/believe/speak, and whatever else you can think of. Although I will have to watch out that once we're back in civilization, I don't go back to all the yuppie-type micromanaging parent I was initially :).