Dear Friends and Family,
I am officially back on my bullshit!!!! 💙💙💙
I have taken to the skies, the seas, the rails, and the road, and I am rambling around the world once again 💙
Damn, this plane is bisexual! Good for her 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
I am flying high and nigh to the firmament of the world, towards a nation at the bleeding edge of the British Isle and the English-Speaking world at large: Scotland.
Although we were high and dry below the firmament at about halfway through the journey, while transferring at Heathrow to a flight towards Aberdeen.
Storytime: when was in college, when I was young and green and ready to photosythesize, I wanted to travel all over Europe. I saw many, many of my colleagues study abroad for a semester, or take a summer to wander, or even just fly out for a two-week trip to some obscure capital. I wanted that too. I wanted to see those sights, to take in those nigts, to drink in those nights. A friend of a friend once brought a bottle of Greek Ouzo to a party that TSA somehow let them bring back in their carry-on from Tunisia, despite her being 19. Now, Ouzo tastes awful; it tastes like a candy cane stored in a shoe in the back of a dentist’s office since 192. But it was the panache of the thing that amazed me, that beguilled me with images of orchards and acropoli and hostels for $20 bucks a night.
Above the North Sea.
And I never actioned those desires. I never had the time, money, or transfer ability to travel when I was in college (besides one abortive trip to southern England) (long story, not getting into it). Even less so when I graduated: I started my job less than two weeks after final exams, flights were far too expensive from Green Bay (like, we are talking $400 just to get to Chicago), and I only got 36 hours of PTO per year.
Streets, Harbors, and Ships of Aberdeen.
So you can imagine my excitement when I moved to the DMV in January 2019! Three whole airports? Flights longer than an 90 minutes long? $400 direct flights to London, Paris, Brussels, Lisbon? I couldn’t freaking wait! I was so excited to finally have opportunities to travel! All I needed to do was save up some money and PTO at my new job, and I should have been able to fly somewhere fun as soon as February 2020! That was right around the corner, nothing could possible stop-
Artifacts from the Aberdeen Maritime Museum.
Yeah, COVID put the kaibash on those travel plans. Then that job went to pot and I had to get a new one, and reset all my PTO accruals to zero. I didn’t even get paid out for the PTO at that second job! What a waste! And it was late 2022 by the time I had saved up enough PTO at the third job to travel widely again. But by then, the job was so horrendous that I really, really needed to get out of there, and taking a week of international vacation was just not in the cards for me whatsoever when the job was that fruitlessly ubstable.
Naval architect’s tools.
But it would be unfair to say I did no traveling in any of that time period. Obviously, I quit the third job and spent the spring and summer of 2023 circling the continent, in what came to be the best 5 months of my life.
The literal first drop of North Sea oil. Isn’t it nuts? For something so precipitously bad to exist as a physical object in a single space?
@Georgia it also kind of reminds me of the homonculis from FMAB.
But it still wasn’t like going abroad. It was the USA: I’m from the USA, how exotic could any other part of this country possibly be?
(The answer was VERY exotic, but that doesn’t work for narrative purposes, so just bear with me here!)
So yeah, it meant something to me, to fly across the whole Atlantic. It meant something to me, to climb aboard the ferry to Orkney:
It meant something to me, to climb into the rental car in Kirkwall and drive up Wideford Hill above the town:
It meant a lot to me. It meant A LOT a lot to me!
I’ve made it! I’ve finally made it! 12 years of wanting, and I finally get to do the travelling abroad I’ve always sought after!
And I couldn’t be happier 💙
That’s all for now,
Stay well everyone,
Evan 💙