To Plan the Plan

In less than 12 hours, I will be airborne somewhere between Des Moines and Washington, DC.  This will mark the long-awaited second vacation for my wife and me.  We were married in October of 2007, and went on the most phenomenally perfect honeymoon I could possibly imagine, and haven’t been on a long vacation together since.

That’s not to say that we’ve been sitting around home for the last 18 months, just that no trip has been the same kind of trip as the honeymoon.  We can usually manage about a week of vacation time per year for a trip, with the rest scavenged for use around the holidays and long weekends at home.  In 2007, that weeklong trip was the honeymoon, to San Francisco and the Sonoma Valley.  I could certainly write an entire post about that trip, and maybe I will eventually, but not today.

Last year we did take a trip, but it wasn’t really the same kind as the honeymoon.  My family had been trying for years to get me to come along to their frequent trips to the Wisconsin Dells, and we finally had a week free, so that’s what we did.  Again, this was an incredible trip, though very different.  It was almost like a family reunion; it had been so long since I’d had a week with my family outside of Christmastime.  We spent the better part of the week relaxing at the resort, spending the days running around the water park, and the evenings enjoying each others’ company in our suite.  Like the honeymoon, there’s a lot more to tell about this trip, too, but another time.

And in between, we had our camping trips.  Camping is one thing that my wife and I were lucky enough to discover that we both loved, and we try to spend virtually any free weekend during the summer in our tent, just the two of us and the thousands of mosquitoes.  However, in all our time together, from our dating years, through our engagement and those 18 months of marriage, the only long-distance traveling trip we’ve had alone has been the honeymoon.

Of course, with such fond memories of our California trip, we knew we wanted to do something similar again, and soon.  So the planning process began.  And this is not so insignificant a step as one might think.  When I go on a trip, I plan it out, every last detail, with thorough research and multiple itineraries before I’m finally satisfied.  I realize a lot of people travel in a much more laissez-faire style – in fact, I’d wager that most people do.  Pick a spot on a map, book flights and figure it out once you get there.  But that’s not the way I operate.  And though I’m sure the spontaneous trips work out well from time to time, I can’t imagine leaving that much to chance.

I have always been a very list-oriented, planning and plotting type of person.  When other kids would hop on Santa’s lap and blurt out toys that sprang to mind, I was prepared with a list of items I wanted, ordered from most desired to least, based on a number of reconnaissance trips to the toy store to chart out my ideas.  I don’t know what makes a person a planner versus a doer, so I can’t say if it’s my genes or the way I was raised (of course none of my siblings have this “sickness” like I do, so who knows?).  But a lot of my vacation planning style can be attributed to my Mom.

We were able to take some pretty great camping trips when I was younger, only some of which I can remember.  My Mom’s philosophy is that every state has something interesting to offer, and one needn’t only visit the tourist destinations to have a good time.  The example of this that I remember the best was our trip to Nebraska.  Stereotypically, there isn’t much that’s great about Nebraska.  But it was the chosen state that year, so we were going to explore it and have a good time.  My Mom called the state tourism office to request the visitor’s guide, and visited the library to get some guidebooks.

From there, the fun really began.  I remember sitting around the dinner table, as we were winding down our meal, and my Mom would pull out the books of information on Nebraska.  “Ash Fall Fossil Bed,” she might say, and proceed to read out the description for us.  We’d all get to think about it, decide amongst ourselves that a volcanic fossil site with dozens of prehistoric bison, rhinos and horses sounds pretty great, and agree to put it on the list.  Over the course of many weeks and months, the itinerary would come together, and we’d be all set to go.

Invariably there might be one small detail or another that wasn’t quite what we’d hoped it would be, but overall, planning the hell out of the trip worked pretty well.  In fact, having a plan allowed you to change to a backup destination if one turned out to be disappointing.  And would we have ended up at a Sod House in the middle of the prairie, or the unearthly Toadstool Park, had we decided to just go and figure it out as we went?  I doubt it.  Each and every one of those childhood vacations was a great experience, in part because my Mom took the time to plan it so.

So, back to the present, and our trip to Washington DC, I knew I had to plan everything perfectly.  I requested the visitors guide, I got the guidebooks from the library, and I even used a few 21^st century tools like Tripadvisor and Yelp.  I looked into every possible thing we could do in DC, and plotted out the absolute best itinerary I could imagine.  Of course, like my Mom, I know that the perfect itinerary never happens, that there are those times where you need a backup destination.  The key is a plan that is also flexible.  Imagine that everything will go as you want, that you will love every place you go to see, but allow yourself to adapt on the fly.

So, by time anyone reads this, I’ll likely already be in DC, and I can assure you, we will be all set to have a good time.  The itinerary is eight pages of details in case things turn out to be perfect.  And in case they don’t, don’t worry – I’ve got that covered too.

Small Town USA

Edgewood, Iowa.  Population 923, according to the 2000 census.  It’s a quiet place, where kids ride their bikes in the streets, neighbors wave hello, and everybody seems to know everybody else.  Any life event – babies being born, high school graduations, weddings, funerals – seem to be shared or at least known by all.  In short, it is the almost polar opposite of the place where I grew up.  And it’s where I got to spend last weekend.

Holidays are hard for my wife and me to plan.  I hate to spend any meaningful holiday time away from my family, she feels the same, and at the same time, we both want to be able to enjoy the holidays together.  That makes for a quite complex set of criteria to meet, and no one will end up 100% happy.  Fortunately we’re both good at compromising, and in the 6 years the two of us have been together, I don’t think a holiday has gone by that’s left either one of us too upset.

The big ones, holiday-wise, are Thanksgiving and Christmas.  There’s just something magical about those two that no other time of the year can match.  For them, we work out a way to split our time between our respective families and each other.  But for the lesser holidays, it often comes down to logistics.  My wife’s hometown is a lot closer than mine to where we live, so it is often the default destination.  For those times when the holiday gets us an extra day off, like Memorial Day or Labor Day, we’ll make the trek back to the Chicago ‘burbs.

Easter is neither a hugely important holiday to me, nor does it come with a bonus day off, so it became an Edgewood holiday.  Don’t get me wrong, Easter is nice.  Coloring hard-boiled eggs, huge chocolate rabbits, and pastel colors everywhere are a lot of fun.  But aside from the religious side for those who partake, it just can’t measure up to the big two.  I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who claims Easter as their favorite holiday.  Not needing to split time between destinations, off to E-town we went.

The first sign you’re approaching Edgewood is literally a sign.  Edgewood is set a little ways off State Highway 13, and at some point in time that apparently bothered the locals.  So for those individuals cruising down the highway just looking for a pleasant town to visit, there is an enormous illuminated sign with the words “Edgewood 3 miles” and a giant green arrow guiding your way in.

Following the arrow’s guidance, you arrive at Edgewood proper.  This looks and feels like a prototypical small town, a Bedford Falls or Pleasantville brought to life.  There’s a hardware store, parking lot full of farmers’ dusty pickup trucks.  The small city park, its swingset and picnic shelter nestled beneath the “Edgewood” water tower.  A faded red brick building with peeling paint identifying the owner’s feed company.  There isn’t a single stoplight in town, just a hanging four-way flashing light.  Eternally blinking yellow toward the highway, and red in to town.

Downtown Edgewood is a main street right out of the past.  The hodgepodge of shops and services, the assortment of storefronts built in different decades and styles.  There’s just about everything you could need all in one place.  From grocery store to café, from gym to hair salon, it’s a true microcosm of our whole society.  At the end of the main street is my Mother-in-Law’s cafe, where we will spend the next few days.

There’s no need to detail every moment of the time spent, but for being just short of 48 hours, it seemed to fly right by.  A series of happy moments, all strung together by the thread of this small town.  The first night: sampling menu ideas for the café, a group of family and friends eat, sip wine and share laughs into the night.  The next day is spent visiting relatives.  First we see my wife’s grandmother in her cozy and inviting apartment.  Then it’s a trip into the surrounding country to see her father on his small plot of land in rural Edgewood.  Time almost stands still as we relax on the deck in the cool spring air, watching the world go by at the pace of the John Deere tractors that occasionally rumble by.

And then it’s Easter morning.  After waking up, we all chip in to help with the meal, doing what we can to help my Mother-in-Law as she calmly prepares food for the dozens who will soon be arriving.  They do arrive, and good-natured chaos breaks out.  Everyone brings a dish of some sort, which all need to be sorted and set out on the tables.  The room quickly becomes a din of voices, brothers and sisters, parents and children, cousins all greeting each other and laughing together.  Meanwhile the children yell and run and play.  Looking around amidst the commotion before during and after the brunch, there isn’t a face without a smile on it.

Eventually it is time for the family to head home, and we are left in the sudden quiet of the shop.  My wife and I, with her family, finally have some downtime, and we sit at the café booths to chat for a while.  With time to reflect, I think back through the hectic and quickly-passing weekend.  The schedule was far from my routine, the location was 200 miles from my home, and many of the people were ones I don’t know terribly well.  But simply being around the joy of the family, happy to be together for the holiday, I was able to share a little of that feeling.

We drive back home, exhausted, and knowing that the next day at work is going to be draining after such a busy two days.  But despite that, we both feel happiness that we traveled back.  Easter may not be much of a holiday, and there’s still no way it can match Thanksgiving or Christmas in the hierarchy of them all.  But spending time with family has its own special magic, regardless of the occasion.  And that’s the same in Edgewood, Iowa, the Chicago suburbs, or any place beyond.

Starting a Blog

Hello world.  A cliché for starting something like this, but it seems apt.  If my rudimentary computer science knowledge is to be trusted, that’s what a computer artificial intelligence thingy is supposed to say when you turn it on.  Now, clearly I am not a machine.  Robots are cool and all, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet.  Check in with me in the 24^th century and we’ll see how things have progressed.  But in a few ways, I do feel like I’ve just booted up and am gazing out at the world.

First, a little background.  I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, although for all the time we spent in “the city,” it could have really been anywhere.  I went to public school, and despite the stereotypes, I actually got a pretty good education.  I have been a good student for as long as I can remember, and I did really well in class.  My scholarship essays from this time talk about how good I was at math and science, and though that’s true, it’s really not the entire story.

You see, while I was in high school, I absolutely decided I wanted to be an aerospace engineer.  My family had gone to the biggest air show in the country, Airventure Oshkosh, and after that I was hooked.  It sounds corny (and did make for good essays back then), but it is as close to true as I can remember.  I won’t repeat the whole story here, because I actually think I articulated it better back then, but the sights and sounds of the show drew me in.  From the gleaming curves of the airfoils on the Cessnas to the thunderous roar of the fighter jets screaming by overhead, it really didn’t take much.

So I did it.  I went to a darn good engineering school for six years and got two degrees proclaiming me a master of this discipline.  I learned a ton and had a blast doing it, but that’s not the point of today’s post.  Maybe another time.  I got an internship, which led to a full-time job in the aerospace industry, and every day I spend 8 hours working on ways to make really heavy things capable of flight.  Which is a neat thing to be able to say.  Most of the time I like this job and my chosen path quite a bit.  Sure, there are occasional frustrations with software or specific projects, but most of the time it goes well and it’s a decent way to spend 40 hours a week.

All of this is leading to a point, I promise.  What happened is that as you’re on your way to becoming an engineer, lots of other areas get pushed aside and forgotten.  I tested out of most of my social sciences and humanities in college, and I was only required to take a single semester of English.  That’s fine, incidentally.  If you’re in training to become an engineer, you don’t really need much of those subjects.  You need lots of aerodynamics and structural analysis and flight controls, but if you can’t put words together in a creative way or identify some arbitrary animal species or discuss economics intelligently, no worries.

But I was actually good at all of that stuff, too.  Going back to the essays I wrote in high school talking up my math and science abilities, I never mentioned that I was also capable in discussing literature, or passionate about the environment, or really into budgeting and making lists.  It didn’t seem relevant to what I was sure I wanted to do, so I ignored it.  For six years in college I ignored those subjects, and continued to do so for the three years since.  And now, when I think back to those forgotten areas, I realize that not only was I good at them, but I liked them too.  And I want to do something about it.

I want to expand my horizons.  Beyond the world of engineering aircraft parts.  Because as fulfilling as that is, like I talked about before, it only really satisfies one side of my brain.  My right brain has been locked away in solitary confinement without sustenance, and lately it has started screaming to be let out.  I need a creative outlet.  My left side is happy 8 hours a day, and the right side has had about enough.  Time to balance things out a bit.  This blog is going to be the start.

What do I expect out of this?  It’s a baby step into bringing my creative side out, so I don’t want to get too carried away.  I’ve tried recently to force myself into writing a story, and I think it was just too much, too soon.  Writing a blog is more straightforward, but still, I think, a worthwhile exercise.  Getting ideas down in a coherent manner, simply gaining practice in writing again, will help me out eventually.  I need these wobbly baby steps before I go out and run a marathon.

Right now, I plan to check in about once a week with a new entry.  Of course, that will vary a lot with busy weeks here and there.  Also, the cynic in me wonders how long I will keep this up, but an entry a week is the goal.  I’m thinking each entry will be musings of mine, based on what I’ve seen, done or thought about that week.  To be perfectly honest, I doubt this will be of interest to anyone but me.  But we’ll see.  One step at a time.  At the moment, I’m writing something, which is more than I’d done for almost a decade.

Reading back, this entry looks pretty rough.  It’s choppy, meandering from idea to idea with a marginal thread holding it all together.  It is my hope that in a year I can look back at this and laugh, seeing how far I’ve come.  After all, a computer’s artificial intelligence starts off with a mere two words, and if the movie Terminator is to be believed, they make a lot of progress really quickly.  Let’s see if I can match that.  Hello, world, indeed.