Hazelnut Reflections

RevGalFridayFIve

Five significant trips you have taken: (Boy, I could go on and on with this one. I love to travel).

1) My parents and I went to Europe for the first time when I was 7. My father is originally from Austria and spent WWII in England. I LOVED England and Wales. I perhaps didn't appreciate all that he was trying to show me about his earlier life, but there was so much I enjoyed: English chocolate and ice cream, all those ruins, the beach in Aberporth (Wales) with the salt smell and the kelp (we didn't have that on Lake Michigan!), taking the Super Tour at Westminster Abbey at my insistence--I see a lot of myself and what I love now in that early trip.

2)Stratford--we moved to a pricey suburb and could no longer afford trips to Europe as a family, but we did go to Canada every summer for the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont. My mom ended up in the hospital while we were there one summer, and I got to go to the theater by myself since there was nothing I could really do. I remember feeling so very grown-up and free, buying my own ticket and sitting by myself.

3)choir tour to Switzerland and Germany, high school--Actually, it's kind of a painful memory. I was such a geek, and not very socially ept. And I got very, very sick. I had a lot of problems with motion sickness, and I had a bad cold on top of it, which all led to a bad case of vertigo in the Swiss Alps. We had a doctor with us on the trip, and he gave me good drugs and taught me how to properly use Dramamine to survive flying. I fly now without too much trouble, even reading. Also, got to go to Luxembourg for the day and see the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam before we flew home. Edited to add: My great grandmother died in the Holocaust and my grandfather and father were refugees, and I was finally old enough to understand all of that and what that might have been like for them . And we left somebody in the Amsterdam airport--he went back to get something at the gift shop and we flew off without him!

4) Grand Canyon, sometime in my 20s. One of a few trips, but this time I went up to visit my then-boyfriend, a lovely Hopi man who was also a kachina carver. He was working at the Canyon for the summer for the Park Service We didn't last long, but I'm the richer for it. On this trip I went to the Hopi mesas, both with him and with some of the Park Service folks. I also hiked halfway down the Canyon by myself (and back up, not as much fun). And the trailer we were staying in got sprayed by a skunk one night--my car didn't get a direct hit, but there was whiff for days afterwards.

The funniest part was when he took me to meet his parents. As we pulled up in one of the little newer Hopi villages that are down off the mesas, and I opened the car door, I saw something slither in the grass beneath me. "Snake!" I jumped about ten feet in the air. Hopi boyfriend was rather amused at citified girlfriend running away from the garter snake.

5) Hawaii, 2002--honeymoon, whales, volcanos, jeeping around the Big Island, the solemnity of Pearl Harbor, listening to the ocean at night, watching the surfers, actually relaxing (something I'm not very good at).

Edited to add a trip to Lake Powell, also sometime after graduate school. A msall trip with Episcopal Campus Ministry at the University of Arizona. Just a weekend away. We got threatened by crazy people at the first place we tried to camp, then found a quiet place by ourselves at another island. On Sunday morning, the chaplain asked me to hold his prayer book for him while he presided at Eucharist on the beach. And for the second time in a short period of time I felt a strong desire to slide the priest out of the way and celebrate myself. It was with a different priest in an entirely different setting, and I've blogged about this elsewhere in my faith story. I came home from that trip and stopped fighting the question of whether I was going to explore the possibility of ordination.

posted by Emily @ 7:50 AM