tinyswirl

So in about about forty two hours I will be sat on a teeny plane, heading for Edinburgh. In the early hours of Tuesday morning I’ll be on a flight to Amsterdam to connect to a flight to Houston, USA….

It’s really started to sink in now. The travel insurance was (finally) sorted yesterday, hire car is booked, we got the currency today and now I’m starting to work out what clothes to take (more than the Boy, but less than normal, as we will be doing some shopping… and I don’t really have much that suits that climate anyway!) …and that must be the longest sentence I’ve typed in a while.

Right now I’m also doing the vital job of ripping the CDs I want to stick on my mp3 player (see, I can multi-task).

We’re going to be booking hotels on the fly, so the netbook is going with me (it can store more music than my player as well) which has the added bonus of me being able to stick all my photos on it as we go along and, for the benefit of my Mother and anyone else who might be interested, I’ll stick them on Facebook and/or Flickr depending on time and wifi availability. Oh and I might do the odd digital postcard via the ‘blog as well.

The only downside right now is that I still don’t have test results back from the doctor and may well have to wait until I’m back…. oh well.

So tomorrow I head back up to Scotland, after my week’s visit back to the area I grew up in (I’ve been on a training course). It’s been a bit weird just being a visitor. My parents no longer live in my “home town” and I stayed out of town, so everything felt a little.. disjointed. It felt less odd than when I used to come home to the house I grew up in and everything so familiar and yet so different.

It’s eight years since I was here for more than a day (because of family weddings) and even when I’ve been back I’ve not been into the town centre, and I’ve been there every day, before the course starts, noticing the new, wondering about the gone, soaking up the familiarity of the still-there. I’ve found myself staring at everyone I’ve walked past, looking for any suggestion in their features that they could be someone I knew, of a name forgotten in the mists of time or a whisper of recognition from them.

I had that today, I saw someone in the cafe I had breakfast in who I worked and socialised with around ten years ago. Busy in conversation, her gaze flashed my way, but not a hint of recognition there…

Two successes this week (apart from completing the courses) were in managing to finally see people that Facebook helped me re-connect with. I had dinner with three school friends, one of whom was one of my “best friends” and who drove me to see my old house. We then went and sat outside the house of the parents of the other one of our trio, plucking up the courage to go and say hi and get some contact details for her. And we did.. and we made contact that night with the joy of texts…

Tomorrow morning I say good bye, once again, to the town, as I fly off to the place I now call home. But this time I am resolved to return to regularly once more.