Back Home--Lessons (and Pictures) from the Trip

We're home! Not quite grounded yet, but the weather is beautiful here, we've been planting seeds and are gradually catching up on life.

First lesson: don't get caught empty-handed! This is a blogger lesson along with everything else: I'm disappointed to have blogged so little during the trip and to have been without my camera at so many picture-worthy moments. I should have made sure I was familiar with the camera-netbook interface before we left, had some posts up my sleeve for gap-times and generally been more prepared. And then, to arrive home and have blogger be out of action for the first day with this post _way_ overdue???

Finally, then--
I learned that rattlesnakes are well-camouflaged in the arid, tough soil of the desert, but can choose the trail itself as their lair.

 I learned how to paint ceilings, and perhaps how not to have an extremely painful neck by the end of it. How did I manage to miss out on painting pretty much my whole life up to now?

 I learned that you can hug a saguaro: you just have to wait for the right time in its life...

 ...and I wore shorts (or unzipped my zipoff pants) for the first time, I swear, in over two years! That's what happens when you live in AK...

I also learned that my exercise tolerance has improved markedly: I'm so happy and grateful for this. Plans definitely afoot for getting in shape (more on this soon) so that I can feel fit to be seen in shorts should the opportunity arise again.

I learned that I needed to be better prepared with food things. The baked yams and avocado held me mostly for our first two days of travel, but for our return journey, a similar strategy went bad. The dried goods went moldy because we hadn't had enough sun to dry them here--reinforcement of my recent decision to acquire a dehydrator...

...but I also learned that with a few requests and lateral thinking, I could get a very satisfying meal out after long hikes. (This was from La Salsa in Tucson--minus cheese and sour cream and plus their eponymous salsa, it was a hearty and nutritious bowl of veggies and black beans, with some brown rice that I didn't really get to.)

I learned that I love the topography and flora of Arizona--it feels so familiar and 'right' to me. It reminds me of Israel and that welcoming warmth and repelling prickliness, straight to my soul.

Heather leads the way

I learned that whilst good exercise is great preparation for a trip, I don't so much need very heavy, hard, muddy, grueling exercise at the very end of a long trip when there's unpacking and unloading to do too.
But that's what we got!
Our wonderful, gracious friend with whom we stayed in Anchorage when we flew home had an old apple tree that she wanted cut down. Phil decided to try to transplant it instead! With the root wad and all, the fully mature tree probably weighed several hundred pounds and it was all we could do to load it into the truck along with our luggage and Anchorage purchases.

Then, we had to roll it down our path, sitting on plywood with rollers (old pipe) under it that we had to keep switching out.

 Phil dug a big hole, and getting it into the hole and off the plywood, and getting the tarp out from around it, was challenging to say the least. The ground was mucky with decomposed kelp that we harvested (smells just like salty manure) and at one point, when tugging out the tarp, I slid all the way into the hole, under the tree!

 So, fingers crossed, the tree may survive. Phil put a cage around it so that the moose and bunnies don't dispatch it immediately. Oh, and you can't tell from the light, but this digging, tugging, heaving, mud-wrestling operation all took place around 10pm, at the end of a very long day of traveling. 

I don't mean to sound grumpy and I'm glad we got the tree moved. Just maybe next time we won't combine it with a long, tiring trip, OK?

The most important thing I learned, though, was how good it feels to spend time with friends and loved ones, to share their lives and what's important to them.

It was so good to see David and Heather...

 ...and David's brother John--and their other brother and sister-in-law (my bad no camera). We weren't the most skilled workforce but it felt so good to help with their house.

 I finally met one of Phil's oldest friends, who drove down from Montana to visit with us in Oregon. He's the same one whose wife is the potter who made us those beautiful bowls I pictured a while back and it was definitely past time that we should get to meet in person and that he and Phil should catch up.

 And of course, we had a great visit with Phil's mom.

So, now we're planting our gardens and I'm slowly catching up with work and writing. I'm so grateful that my writers' group met yesterday, our first day back: it felt grounding and familiar to be back among them. I'm hoping to feel more caught up by the end of the weekend.

How long does it take you to feel caught up after a trip? How do you implement the lessons that you learn from each trip?
much love