“Did you see five Asian males with guns threatening to shoot each other?” I should have preferred the police officer to have simply said welcome back to Florida after a year away. A year filled with color and life and fresh horizons. “No,” I said to her through a mouthful of potato chips, baked for good health, that I was sharing with Rusty, exhausted after a walk around the Publix parking lot. Our stroll was free of gunshots and other random violence but the police officer’s quest for evil doers was in line with expectations I suppose. “No one in Mexico ever asked us that,” Layne said when I told her what happened. She hadn’t seen any armed Asian men on her trek through the Jacksonville Publix.
We stopped by Freedom VanGo briefly to report on the success of the upgrades they installed last year. They usually transform Sprinter four wheel drive vans into show pieces of custom off road art and our little workhorse home was a bit of a one off for them. No one else has ever put a winch on a Promaster apparently. They were surprised we had actually used it twice to get us out of a jam. The tricked out Sprinters with huge bumpers and boxes, ladders and light bars towered over our dusty little road van, they pristine and sparkling with huge off road tires but also with no chance of being driven in dangerous Mexico.
The fact is we aren’t going to be in Mexico probably before mid January. I am being required to mark time in the southeast until the end of the year to celebrate Layne’s sister’s wedding anniversary. My hope had been for a summer celebration outdoors under the sun but we will be required, by brother in law Bob’s desire, to freeze our backsides off under the shadow of Mount Mitchell a mid winter romp in Asheville, a city capable of producing snow and ice and damp short days in lieu of beach days under Mexico’s winter sun. I am grumpy. I understand he wanted to celebrate the actual day of the nuptials fifty years ago, but his desire is holding up my travels!
The weather gods did not cooperate when we stopped by to moochdock at Webbs place on the water. It was lovely and sunny and fresh in South Carolina but there was not a breath of wind.
We did not take the original GANNET out for a day sail but we enjoyed sunsets and travel stories from the writer and circumnavigator and he reminded me Mexico will be there when we get there.
I have Key West to look forward to while observing how Rusty reacts to his old haunts. We will see friends in a zig zag course across the sunshine state and arrive after Fantasy Fest for a few weeks moochdocking to catch up with friends.
Hanging out with Webb Chiles in the warmth of a southern autumn brought me home in a way. I have that end of vacation feeling as though I am about to slip back into routines, and the feeling makes me agitated. I’m retired and about to go away for a long time. I need to slow down and remember that which is old is new and even though it is all familiar, and welcome to some degree, I come home as a stranger. I am not who I was.
“Traveling—it gives you a home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.” — Ibn Battuta
