With all the joy of embarking on vacation, there are nonetheless things I dread. Since 2005, when I was in Dar es Salaam, the routine is similar. The majority of the flights I take leave somewhere around midnight. Packing is finalized in the evening. The house is checked one last time to make sure that everything is in order for it to be vacant for a few weeks. I’m usually tired and I look longingly one last time at my bed, knowing that I will be spending the next 24-32 hours (depending on the route/connections) mostly in cramped conditions and desperately trying to find a way to sleep. Though we’ve had some travel hiccups along way (a snowy night on the floor of the Amsterdam airport while Priya was pregnant with Kiran, delays, lost luggage, etc.), it generally all works out in the end. We get to where we need to be.
 |
| and so it begins... |
The flights from Nairobi to Amsterdam to Minneapolis went rather smoothly, all things considered. The girls we’re born flying around the globe so they need little to no guidance (except a bit with their packing). It makes it so much easier than when they were young and in nappies. I’m not sure how we did that so many times without going completely insane.
* * *
We arrived in Minneapolis to frigid temperatures. That’s usually the case this time of year. But we were happy to see some snow on the ground. Our friend Kathy picked us up at the airport and we made our way the short distance to her house in St. Paul. It’s always a bit surreal to me to arrive in a completely different climate in a completely different time zone and a completely different culture. The travel through Amsterdam provides a bit of transition but not much.
I feel bad that we are often zombies when we arrive. She’s stuck with the four of us navigating our jet lag. In retrospect, with the exception of needing to go to bed super early day two, we did pretty well.
 |
| the traditional baking of the Christmas cookies |
One thing that helps me is to jump right into some sort of workout routine. Usually that involves going for a run the first morning. So that’s what I set out to do. I got up before sunrise, pulled my running shoes out of the suitcase and checked my phone to see what the temperature was in order to dress accordingly. It indicated 23 degrees (a few degree below freezing) so I figured it would be manageable with two layers up top. I didn’t have a hat but I thought I’d be okay once I warmed up.
I headed out the door and rather quickly I realized that something was amiss. It was painfully cold. After less than two minutes, I turned around and headed back. I rechecked my phone and realized that my GPS hadn’t shifted to my new location. The 23 degrees that I’d read were Celsius and the current temperature in Nairobi. In fact, St. Paul was sitting at -7 F. (-21 C.) wind chill. I was way off in my clothing. My winter gear was in storage in Idaho so I had few options on me. I put on everything I had, wrapped a scarf around my head like a mummy with only my eyes peeking out, and gave it another try. I must have been out for only about twenty minutes before I turned around and headed back. Forty minutes exposure was about all I could manage.
 |
| sun dog on the right |
I did learn a new term while we were there: sun dog. Having grown up on a cold climate, I feel a bit stupid that I don’t remember every hearing it. It refers to halos around the sun that are caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Supposedly means that precipitation is on the way, which, in our case, would indeed be the case as we received a couple of inches of snow a few hours later.
* * *
After receiving the new snow, and it being much warmer than the previous day, we decided to head out into the cold and play fox and geese. I’m sure it has other names but that was the name Kathy remembered from her youth in Minnesota and it seems that I remember it being called that as well. In fact, it’s a game of tag in the snow and your movements are limited to paths in the snow in the shape of a spoked wheel, the center being “home” (a place you can’t be tagged). We’d had fun playing it the previous year and it turned out to be just as fun this year. And it gets people outside and exercising.
After three days, we were off to Louisville, Kentucky, for the second leg of our trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment