Sunday - April 24, 2005

Home Again, 115 Days Later

Just before dawn on Friday, April 22, we sailed up the Hudson River, under the Verizano Bridge, and past the Statue of Liberty to arrive in New York, right back where we had started from on January 3. If you have been following this blog, you will know that this World voyage has been an extraordinary adventure and one that we are sad to see end. How are we going to deal with re-entry and reality after being away for 3 months and 3 weeks? A fellow I met on the ship who has done five world cruises told me that there are four things he hates about returning home: having to make his own bed, having to get his own breakfast, not having a chocolate on his pillow each night, and having to put his own napkin in his lap!

It took just 5 minutes in La Guardia airport to remind us why we sailed around the world instead of flying. Being a Friday, the place was hectic and crowded. Northwest airlines charged us $25 because one of the bags we were checking was overweight and demanded that I check my carry-on bag, that was filled with liquor and glassware. (Luckily, none of the liquor bottles broke, but my two QE2 crystal souvenir glasses are history.) We tried to get on an earlier flight than the one I had booked, but no such luck. It was overbooked and there was no room for stand-bys. However, our luggage did go on that flight. To pass time, we went to Chilli's for lunch and were horrified at how big the portions were that we were served. We had gotten used to eating a reasonable amount of food at one sitting and had no appetite for such an enormous portion. I was rather taken aback to think that 4 months ago, I might have eaten it all without much effort.

Finally, we arrived in Detroit to see that spring had arrived. The trees were budding out and there were banks of daffodils along the road. There was also quite a bit of rain! And it rained all the way home to Ann Arbor. The first thing we noticed as we rounded the corner to our house was our Bradford Pear tree. It was covered in white blossoms and looked gorgeous. Our purple rhododendron bushes were also in full bloom, and our tulips and daffodils added splashes of color around the garden. It was a lovely sight, but hard to fully appreciate in the rain and the cold. We decided to cheer ourselves up by going for comfort food at our favorite restaurant, Paesanos. We got such a warm welcome there that we couldn't help but feel better and coming home to sleep in our own bed felt pretty good too, but I can't say that we were completely happy to be home. We both felt pretty ambivalent about it all.

I think that settling in may be as much work as getting us ready to go. There are four bins of mail to sort through, even though our friends had done a heroic job of weeding out the junk mail. There are suitcases to unpack and five more to come when DHL delivers them later next week. There are a couple of minor things to fix around the house, although our housesitter did such a good job of looking after things that the house seems cleaner than when we left. And then there is the prospect of going back to work on Monday. That is definitely going to be an adjustment for both of us. The fact that it snowed for most of Saturday evening and all day on Sunday has just added insult to injury. All those flowers I talked about earlier are looking pretty droopy today, weighted down by a few inches of snow.

But the snow will pass and we will make the necessary adjustments and life will go on, much as it did before we left. However, we are definitely not the same people who boarded the ship on January 3. We have seen so much of the world that we had only dreamed about before and we learned a few things about ourselves in the process. We have a wealth of memories that will stay with us forever, not to mention the 3,000+ photos that I took. This world cruise was one of the best things we have ever done for ourselves, and we can't wait to do it again!