travel

I’m about to head out on the road again, and thanks to a quirk of airlines, I’ll be flying into Vermont and out through Boston. I’m doing it purely so I can roadtrip through Vermont, and see what there is to see.

I have no idea what I’ll see, but I’m taking my new camera rig.

Any suggestions?

Wondering why Vermont? See this map, and it’ll make sense:

Time to cross New England off of the list, once and for all!

When I put yesterday’s fresh rounds of travel into TripIt, I saw a line that summed up my year:

You’ve traveled 43,660 mi to 44 locations.

I nodded, thinking to myself about the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met — or reconnected with — and felt profoundly grateful. I’ve been welcome in a lot of places over the past year, slept on a few new couches, met delightfully new recombinations of humanity. All unique, none replaceable.

Extended amounts of travel, over time, affect you. The anonymity of airports begins to rub off on you after a while. If you’re not careful, your web of connections to the world at large comes at the price of feeling a little  less seated in the place where you ostensibly live: when you consider where to shop, or where to order takeout from, you first reset your expectations by asking yourself what city you are in today.

This morning, while working to finish Invariant, I found myelf reflecting on the travel schedule I’ve been maintaining over the past year and the conflicting effects it’s had on my creative time. My stash has picked up fabric from Denmark, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, Holland, and England. That same travel schedule has made it very difficult for me to actually work through the projects in my head, making me feel that I am “unproductive” when, in fact, I’m just not at home long enough to dig into anything larger than what I call a “snack food project.”

I’ve taken the rest of the week off of work in a fit of “oh crap I will be on the road for HOW long? and what can I finish if I focus on nothing but sewing for a week?”

We’re gonna need a montage. I realize that a movie about quilting can only go in either the “Beautiful Mind” (crazed genius throws fabric about long enough that amazing things happen) vein or the “Waiting For Godot” vein (audience sits around, waiting for the explosions and car chases that never happen) vein.

I’m going to have a LOT of time in the next few days to listen to music. I need recommendations. I promise jazzy montage pix.

A sample of the excitement level: I mean, right now I’m working on a top of almost Amish simplicity based on a huge pile of drapery silks I was given a couple of years ago. I cut them into huge triangles because — hey DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME, I’M STILL TALKING HERE.

As I tidied up the entry for Fuego, since I put it in the mail today, I looked over the quilt list for the year and was a little disheartened, because I felt like I haven’t accomplished much this year. It’s also entirely possible that I’m an idiot.

It’s the end of October. In 2012, I’ve finished:

…and rescued this antique top and finished it out:

…and helped a friend quilt two quilts for his daughters:

I was also away from home for nearly two months.

I also have two quilts (“Cinder and Smoke” and “Hopscotch”) in progress, and hope to finish both before the end of the year.

…and we’re home. This is the unofficial part of the trip that falls between ‘the end of the trip’ and ‘the resumption of real life.’ I am home, and hobbling on somewhat sore and extremely tired legs, and I’m dealing with the oddity that is culture shock in my own country.

On the nine-hour flight back, I tried to think through some of the questions I expected to be asked.

How was it? Amazing. Time stretched in strange ways; in the moment the trip felt long long long, and then the moment I got in the cab to go to Heathrow, I could feel time contracting, making the entire trip feel like one quick blur. I know I spent a week in Germany, and it now feels like five minutes, if I don’t stop to think about it in detail.

Did you enjoy it? Yes.

Were there down sides? Yes.