Right now its 3:30am local time and I’ve just woken up. I wandered off up to our hotel room while Mike was busy whipping off some news for the website just after lunch at 2pm, lay my head on the pillow and have just woken up. Since I’m not someone who can almost ever sleep during the day, initially I thought it was 3:30 in the afternoon, but it seemed kind of dark and quiet. How wonderful to sleep like a child again – I feel like I imagine my daughter does when I look down at her sleeping in the afternoon – sleeping the sleep of the innocent. It’s so great to sleep just because one is exhausted, at any time of the day or night, and not just because it’s “time to sleep”.
LIFE ON THE ROAD
Notwithstanding the stress which we face from time to time, Mike and I are really enjoying life on the road. We’ve had a bunch of discussions about how interesting, exciting, vital and real it seems. It takes me back to my youthful reading of Bruce Chatwin’s book, Songlines, in which he looks at the nomadic spirit in humans, especially the aboriginal people of Aussie. I suppose that flying’s not a great replacement for walking, but there’re definitely some benefits associated with facing real dangers – not just the subtle anxieties of everyday life; eating because one is hungry (often very hungry!) – not because it’s time to eat; sleeping because one is tired – not because it’s time to sleep; thinking hard about things – because a failure to think hard may result in catastrophe, not just a feeling of being foolish in front of your peers, and so on.
THE TRAVEL SPIRIT
I can’t explain how awesome it feels to be flying over places that I’ve vaguely heard of but couldn’t really place – Last night for example parts of the northern Amazon area, Panamaribo, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Montserrat, Martinique, Fort de France, St Croix and so on. Who knows what tomorrow night will bring? We really are pretty footloose and fancy-free, as Mike explained. The Marshall Islands are looking increasingly difficult (thanks Karlheinz for the contact, we’ll follow up), so we’re looking at alternatives. With this little plane of ours, we realise we can go a lot of places – maybe we go from Hawaii to Palmyra Atoll? Then maybe American Samoa, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and on, or maybe Papua New Guinea rather than Australia. (Though we know less people in Papua New Guinea and who knows how good the avgas is?). Anyhow, we’ve still got a lot of decisions to make and, fortunately, since Oshkosh comes first, quite a bit of time and resources to make them.
QUESTIONS AND MESSAGES
Thanks everyone for all the wonderful messages and questions. Since at last we’ve got a full day in one place (for the first time in 8 days), this evening we’ll try take some time to properly answer questions and respond to the good wishes we’ve received. Having a website like this is a bit like becoming a facebook groupie – I see messages from all sorts of people I haven’t heard of from years. I hope that at last you’ll hear back from me tonight. Meanwhile, here are a couple of photos from the US Virgin Islands leg last night and some video to show you how it really is – like they say, video never lies!
