In March 2020, I was supposed to visit my mother in Beaufort, South Carolina (where she lives, and where I was born), but COVID obviously had other plans for us all at that point, so the trip was scratched. Likewise in April 2020, when Marcia and Katelin were supposed to make their annual Girl Power Trip (they were both born on March 8th, which is International Women’s Day in most of the non-retogressive world)(e.g. not here) to Costa Rica, but that trip also bit the dust, along with several others in the months ahead.

While I know it’s too soon to declare that COVID is behind us, with the entire family as vaccinated as we can be, and with hospitalization rates down significantly, we decided that we’d finally re-schedule those trips this month. We drove to Las Vegas two weekends ago and spent some time with Katelin and John in their fab new house there, then last week, Katelin and Marcia flew off westward to the Big Island of Hawai’i, and I flew east to the land of my forefathers and foremothers. Marcia and I think this is the greatest distance we’ve ever been away from each other in our 35-ish years as a couple. Felt very weird, especially since we’d not spent a night apart since the dawn of the Anno Virum.

Our outbound trips from Las Vegas were both pretty heinous. Marcia and Katelin were supposed to go from Vegas to Los Angeles to Kona, but after tickets were secured, Delta Airlines decided that they needed a bonus stop in Seattle on the way out, as well, to turn a reasonable trip into a full-day-plus slog. My flights (Vegas to Dallas to Savannah) were both way late, and there was a truly horrific storm over the Mississippi Delta, so we were routed down to the Gulf of Mexico to try to get around it. After the fact, I pulled up the FlightAware trip report just to make sure I experienced what I thought I had experienced. I did:

I’ve flown a lot over the years, and I’d say that the turbulence and amazing high-altitude lightning were among the most intense that I’ve ever experienced. It was a relief to hit the tarmac in Savannah a few hours late, but then I discovered that my pre-paid rental car had long been given to someone else, that the taxis that service the airport were no longer running, and that the Uber/Lyft crowd seemed to mostly be asleep as well. I didn’t actually make it to my hotel room until well after 2am, and I only managed to avoid sleeping in the concourse or walking three-ish miles down a dark and narrow country road by convincing an Uber driver to let me pay him cash to jump in a car that someone else had secured.

But then I headed up to Beaufort the next morning, and all was good. I had a lovely visit with my mother, got to see my aunt and her husband for a superb Shrimp and Grits dinner, and hit most of the personally significant spots that I normally visit when I’m in the area. Highlights included the hospital where I was born (and where my Dad died), the house my parents lived in when I first came home from the hospital, a couple of urban shacks where my Mom has lived over the years, Beaufort National Cemetery (where my Dad is buried), Stoney Creek Cemetery (where most of my other ancestors on that side of the family are buried), the Village of McPhersonville (where said ancestors once all lived), Old Sheldon (a ruined stone church that would have served my family in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries), and Hunting Island, which I consider to be the finest beach on the American east coast. (Even though it sustained incredible damage from Hurricane Matthew a few years back). I also got to eat most all of the things I crave when I’m home, including the aforementioned Shrimp and Grits, a Shrimp Burger and hush puppies from the Shrimp Shack, a heaping helping of boiled peanuts, a good bowl of Brunswick Stew, and various and sundry other white trash specialties from the Low Country. Mmm, mmm, good . . . . even if I’m still feeling the salt and fat bloat from that tasty, tasty fare.

I flew back to Las Vegas on Sunday, and Marcia and Katelin arrived back there early this morning after a red-eye from Kona. This time, all of our flights were smooth and on schedule, so that was a relief. I met Marcia at the airport and we motored on home, arriving just after lunch-time, happy to be back in our nest, and looking forward to sleeping in our own bed tonight. Marcia and Katelin took photos of their trip, and I’ll probably set up an album for that once they send them all to me. I was my usual photo-obsessed self, and have posted my usual album over at Flickr of the trip’s highlights. You can click on the image of Stoney Creek Cemetery below if you’d like to see what else is over there; most of the snaps are from the Low Country, with some bookends of our time in Las Vegas.

We’re traveling to Minnesota next weekend (Marcia’s homeland) to attend a memorial service for her sister, so I will probably have another post of this ilk when we get back from that. We’ve got a couple of other treks already on the books in the months ahead (California, North Carolina/Tennessee, Albuquerque, and a return to the Grand Canyon), so those will no doubt show up here too.

Got to make up for lost travel time while we can. It feels good to be be abroad again, as much as we love being here, and coming home.