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Note #152: Off to the airport (2024.11.5)

I said I would try to write again briefly before we left, and here we are. We got everything packed with an hour left to spare, and as of this moment I’ve got about forty-five minutes left before we need to leave for the airport.

The original purpose of this trip was to attend the annual American Folklore Society meeting in Albuquerque, but since I am on sabbatical this semester HJ will be coming with me and we’ve decided to stretch the trip out. I will have two grad students coming with me, but they will of course be returning to Korea after the conference is over—it’s still the middle of the semester for them, after all.

So my students will be leaving early Sunday morning, but we will be going on a hike that day and spending the night in Albuquerque before taking a train up to Santa Fe the next day. We haven’t been to Santa Fe in over twenty years (well, I was there ten years ago, but we haven’t been there together in over twenty years), so we’ll be spending a few days there before renting a car and driving around the Four Corners region. We’ll be meeting friends and family (and family of friends) along the way, and we’ll be seeing some sights we’ve seen before (like the Grand Canyon) and some sights we haven’t seen before (like Monument Valley). Eventually we will make our way east to southern Texas to visit an old friend and colleague before driving up to my parents’ place in the Dallas area. There we will be spending Thanksgiving with the family—my brother who now lives in Oregon will be flying in for the occasion. I did the math, and this will be the first time in thirty years that the whole family will be together for Thanksgiving. Even back in 2017, when we were actually in the States during Thanksgiving, we stayed up in Cambridge and had Thanksgiving dinner with some friends from church who kindly invited us over.

So we’ll be gone for nearly four weeks, which is quite a bit more than I am used to planning for when I head off to AFS. Usually it is four or five days and I bring one small check-in bag and one small carry-on; this time we have three large check-in bags, one full-size carry-on, and my backpack stuffed with our computers, etc. We’re taking the airport train out, so it’s going to be a little cumbersome to drag everything through the subway, but we’ll manage. I keep wondering if we’re bringing too many clothes, but we are going to be in some high-altitude areas that are going to be quite cold—I figure it’s better to have too many warm clothes than not enough. Besides, we’re old now, so we need to stay warm.

Anyway, this all only took me about ten minutes to write, but HJ is pacing around like a caged animal, so we might decide to head out early. Our original planned departure time would have still given us plenty of time, but the sooner we can get our bags checked in and everything taken care of the better, I suppose. So I’ll wrap this up here. I don’t plan on writing anything while we are in the States, so I’ll wish you a happy Thanksgiving in advance. I’ll be back in December.