The Trip in Review

I'm back from Washington and trying to get settled into teaching again (and true to form, the very first student of the day was a no-show). I'll catch up on some incomplete posts pretty soon, but for now, here's a collection of random thoughts from the past week:

• It's been a long time since I've gone someplace on a trip and thought, "you know, I could live here," but I felt that way about the Pacific Northwest. The weather was amazing (it barely got out of the 60's the whole time we were there), and I was told many times that the winters aren't all that extreme either. It really was beautiful up there; as I said in an earlier post, almost every picture could be a postcard. (OK, we'll wait until I actually get those pictures uploaded to the computer before finalizing that assessment; the thumbnails that can be seen through the viewfinder don't always give an accurate rendering of the picture, and it's possible that my hands were shaky at times.)


• I found myself feeling very relaxed up there. Nobody ever really seemed in a hurry, and, for the most part, I was right there with them. Maybe it's because, thanks to the winding-ness of so many of the roads, I rarely saw speed limits above 60 mph, or maybe it's because there's just so much to see up here and it'd be a shame to miss it by speeding past it all the time.


• That being said, there were quite a few times when people just pulled right out in front of us on the road. We weren't sure if that was just a local driving quirk or rather that the locals didn't expect us Texans to be driving so fast, and they thought they'd have more time to get out than they actually did.


• I've already had a lot of people ask me if it rained all the time we were there (the usual stereotype). It didn't, but it did rain a few times on the day we spent in Seattle, which is what everyone would expect.


• It was great to be away from Texas during a very hot week. Every morning, I'd get up and check the weather on my computer, and it would usualy say 50-something. I'd then look at the Garland reading, and at the same time (which, granted, was two hours later), it would already be 92 or so down here. I didn't miss that part of home a bit, and the reality hit me the second I walked off the plane and into the jetway; it was like being smacked in the face with a blast from a furnace.

I'll get around to updating those posts from last week pretty soon.