Update 6-19-12

Hi,

    I knew I was going to miss three of these updates, but I figured I could fill them in with notes about my trip, about the small New York gathering, and about the small Washington, DC, gathering.  That turned out to be easy, hard, and then easy again.
    The center of my trip was my annual week-long stay with my mom.  She's eighty-four, still lives at home, and has four children who each try to call her at least once a week.  When we all lose track and call on the same day, it kind of overwhelms her.  The four of us also live at varying distances from her, so we all try to visit occasionally.
    Originally, I'd planned to fly to New York and then spend three weeks driving slowly down the coast.  This is part of my ongoing sixty-fifth birthday celebration.  But the friends I wanted to see in Key West were going to be away when I hoped to visit them in mid-July, so I juggled my plans, started by flying to Florida, made a couple of stops there, and then flew from Orlando to New York.  After the week with my mother, I drove to DC, making a few other stops along the way.  That cut out everyone I'd wanted to see between DC and Florida, and the fact that I shortened my trip by a week cut out other people I'd hoped to see in Florida, Washington, and New York.
    Still, I mostly travel to see people, not places, so I was surprised at how much sightseeing I ended up doing.  For example, I never expected to be six miles into the Atlantic, snorkeling, or walking the battlefield at Antietam and inspecting the remains of the armory site at Harper's Ferry.  I had expected to see parts of Disney World because the daughter and son-in-law of the friends I was visiting near there work for that company.  But I hadn't seen Disney World since a month after it opened in 1971, so I knew it would be interestingly changed.
    Let me start with the Atlantic:  I'd never done any serious snorkeling, just the kid stuff you do in a pool or at the beach.  That's because I can't see very well without my glasses, and you can't easily wear glasses under a face mask.  But the friends I was visiting are also nearsighted, so they had face masks with magnifying lenses.  These turned out to be terrific, and for the first time, I could see underwater.  In the Key West coral, there are lots of interesting fish.
    I also discovered the ocean is very salty.  Maybe it doesn't seem that way in the breaking waves at the beach, especially those protected by sandbars.  But it sure seemed salty when it was washing into my mouth.  Plus, I was reminded how little upper body strength I have.  When my friends asked, "Can you swim?" I immediately said, "Sure," and thought, "Do they think I'm an idiot?"  But in the ocean, with even a four-knot current coming against me, I really can't do more than stay in place.  My friends had planned to take me nine miles offshore, where the snorkeling was even better, but the current there was even stronger.  So they told me to drift, watch the fish, and then come to the surface.  Somehow, they'd find me.
    My friends were also aware that I had no real boating experience.  I warned them that I'd nearly capsized Chuck Gleichmann's speedboat when we were in high school.  I hadn't learned to drive yet so didn't realize you didn't have to crank the steering wheel just to turn mildly left.  My friends gave me some quick instruction but said that if anything happened to them not to try to take the boat in myself.  "The coral is really close to the surface, sometimes just a couple of inches down.  If we're in trouble, and you're alone in the boat, just grab the radio and shout 'Mayday!  Mayday!' "  My friends further explained that there were two types of sailors in Key West:  those who'd gone aground and wrecked their expensive propellers, and those who lied about it.
    Antietam and Harper's Ferry were very different kinds of experiences.  For one thing, I wasn't in danger of killing myself.  For another, I was reminded how poorly I know my American history.  I knew Antietam was the site of a major Civil War battle, and the people in the South call it Sharpsville.  And I knew Harper's Ferry had something to do with John Brown.  But that was about it.  I didn't know the chronology.  I didn't know the importance of the events.  I didn't understand the repercussions, and I didn't know that they involved Stonewall Jackson, Clara Barton, and J.E.B. Stuart.  Now, I know a little more about that, at least for a while.
    The battlefield was sobering.  It was green, broad, and beautiful and probably had been the day of the battle, too, as the National Park Service has kept the land mainly unchanged.  But that didn't stop over 23,000 men from dying.  Harper's Ferry is also well preserved, in a cleaned-up Colonial Williamsburg way.  But walking the steep main street, you can kind of time travel and remove the overlays of gentility in your imagination, replacing them with more realistic nineteenth century grime. 
    At the other extreme, Disney World, of course, has no dirt.  It's fantasy, and though pirates still exist and are mean and dangerous, the animatronic ones in the Magic Kingdom ain't.  Somehow I remembered that, in 1971, I parked in a lot named Grumpy.  Now, in Epcot, the lots are named after inspiring words like Discover and Create.  I miss the dwarves.


Rich