Posted by Boone in General

Jess and I have been so crazy super busy lately; we have not posted anything here in months. The elusive “free time” is hard to come by these days. …But its all for the best.

2010 is the largest travel year we have ever had (…and this from people who have traveled across the country, from New York to Hawaii in a single year). So, be warned that the next few posts will probably be about travel in some shape or another. Besides Jess’s go-lives and my traveling out to San Diego at least once a month for work, we are less than 30 days away from our 3 week trip to Europe. A crazy amount of planning is involved with travel for that amount of time. More on that to come later…

When your locked in small flying room for a few hours, the mind has time to wonder. Here are a few of my recent travel insights from 35,000 feet up.

Clouds:

Clouds never cease to amaze me. I am probably one of the few who isn’t fussy about middle, window, isle, etc. when I sit in on an airplane. I spend most of my time reading or working anyway. However, if I have a window seat, you can bet your bottom dollar that I will spend time gazing out that window. There is just something unbelievably special about breaking through that first layer of dark clouds on a cold and rainy day to be greeted by the golden glow of sunshine as it warms your face through triple panned Plexiglas.

For the brief few moments when you’ve risen just high enough to see across the clouds for miles, beneath you the sky turn into a sea of white, where The Deadliest Catch meets Zeus atop Mt. Olympus. Sometimes, non existent where you can see down to the round farm fields of the West, appearing like water rings on a college coffee table. Sometimes so thick they look like CoolWhip spires spread perfectly over the stormy layer that lay below. (If only Laverne Boulion could grow a Strawberry large enough for such a sky dessert.)

And like humidity on a Wisconsin summer day, turbulence is the Yin to the beautiful cloud Yang. Inevitably, when ascending/descending through clouds the plane will shimmy as if to remind us exactly how high we truly are. (‘Shimmy’ ranging from driving to Eau Claire on old 53 to feeling like Bobby Brown is teaching the plane a lesson.) When that first turbulence hits, its always fun to watch the shiny new fliers as they clutch their chair arms and mouth incantations to their deity of choice.

In the end we all arrive safely, enjoy our time at our destination, and prepare to do it all over again. Happy Travels!