Inconveniences

If you can possibly avoid the mistake of misplacing the keys to your rental car, you should. Misplacing the keys to your rental car presents the opportunity to practice patience, kindness, tolerance, peacefulness, and a number of other virtues in trying circumstances. Mostly, you wait on the phone, and the rental car company tries to tell you that you're on your own...good luck in as many words and hours as possible, The car company's trying doesn't end until you give up and call a taxi for a ride back to your hotel.

Thankfully, I was able to see the upside in the situation. The unlicensed cab and limousine company I called sent over a sedan which turned out to be a white 90's Buick that drove me across the causeway for the price of a very nice dinner for one. Sharing the backseat with a walker and two canes that I presume belonged to the driver or his partner was an added bonus.  It's an experience that I won't soon forget.

I did manage to get in some walking today on the Eastern Shore Trail. I took off on foot from the hotel in search of dinner. Since I'd spent my dinner money on a ride, I opted for the slightly less expensive, but equally gastronomically pleasing, "bag o' burritos" from the Taco Bell.  Not bad...not good...not expensive...filling.  Pretty good deal for a person on foot.

I captured the first "sharable" picture of an alligator on the way to my bean stuffed flour tortilla delights. The 'gator, an average sized bugger, was lounging around in D'Olive Creek annoying the fish in his immediate vicinity if they're aerial acrobatics are any real indication.

Alligator - Daphne, AL

I also noticed that the Easter Shore Trail kiosk on US 90 has taken it's second beating in less than a year. Rory Conlan asked me if I thought folks were hitting the trail map shelter on purpose just for the sake of mischief.  I sent him the following picture and explanation.

Eastern Shore Trail Kiosk - Down for the count a second time in a year

Those broken and leaning poles are six inch square pressure treated lumber. There is a broken hubcap, part of a broken windshield, and various other odds and ends that you might find at the scene where violence has been visited on a automobile by something solid and relatively unyielding. If folks are doing this for the sake of mischief, the must be a special kind of joker who likes to perpetrate very expensive (for them or whomever owns the car) acts of very loud vandalism. I'm pretty sure this is happening because folks aren't paying enough attention when rounding the curve that leads up to this point several meters departed from the right lane of the road.

Today I learned a thing or two about the willingness of a certain rental car company's willingness to help you get out of a jam associated with misplaced keys. They're charging you daily rent, and it turns out they're perfectly willing to collect the fee whether you're using their car or it's sitting uselessly in the parking lot at work. Fortunately the keys were located in the back seat of a friend from work who drove us all to lunch. I had managed at that point to extricate myself from the most pressing problem with the application of forty five dollars and without making an angry ass of myself with the folks who were going a pretty far stretch out of their way not to help me. When he called to announce the good news, I was pretty stoked.

You never can tell what lessons life my put in front of you to learn. I'll wake up in the morning an eager pupil with a taste for adventure.

Back from Sea, Returning to Routine

I was fortunate enough to spend the last three days out in the Gulf of Mexico to participate in the initial testing of a fantastic and complex machine. That's another story for another day, but it did provide what seems like an inflection point on my path back to my walking routine. I spent quite a bit of time on my feet, and the injury didn't act up to much.

Upon my return, I hit the trail for a little ramble through Daphne, AL. Back to the familiar on the Eastern Shore Trail.

Eastern Shore Trail - Daphne, AL

For early March, the weather is warm and the first trip down to the beach seemed to be in order. The water's still cool, but the sun heated sand holds the promise of life returning from the winter hiatus.

Daphne Beach

The sun set on one of the more relaxing and restful days that I've had in a number of months. Like every sunset it was unique as well as beautiful.

Sunset - Daphne, AL

Tomorrow will be a return to a bit of the grind associated with work, but as always, I'm looking forward to what it has in store for me.

The Benefits of Air Travel

I found myself on the road again for work. More accurately, I took to the air and in a surprisingly short period of time covered over 1800 miles on my way to lower latitudes. Although a bit on the pricey side, airports are one of those places where you are easily able to access anything that your heart might desire.  They really have become highly functional as well as artistic facilities. Those features are all on the public facing side of an incredibly complex and effective logistics enterprise that moves thousands of people and thousands of tons of cargo across the country (and the world) quickly and efficiently everyday.

Sunrise at Charlotte International Airport

Part way to my final destination, I found myself back in the land of what one of my friends calls the "Panther Plane" for obvious reasons.

Vertical Stabilizer of the "Panther Plane"

I also stumbled across this blast from what I assumed was the long forgotten past of a different sort of air travel.

Piedmont Airlines Offices

I always assumed that Piedmont Airlines was one of those regional carriers that had vanished into the mists of time.  There were some major changes after they merged with US Air in 1989, and here is some of Piedmont's earlier history. It turns out that they are still operating under the American Airlines group, and their headquarters is still in Salisbury, MD.  Charlotte International Airport is one of their principle hubs.  I do like their logo.

Arriving in my final destination for the day, I slowed down my pace quite a bit, and I put in just over eleven miles on the ground. As sometimes happens, I really wasn't too very thrilled about the prospect of that kind of distance after a day of travel, but when I got to about the halfway point, my outlook had shifted, and I was glad to be out on the trial.

Statue of the goddess Daphne in front
of the Daphne, AL City Hall

This statue is one of my favorite vistas along the thirty two mile long Eastern Shore Trail that runs from Spanish Fort, AL to south of Fairhope, AL. It is especially striking at sunset, and I caught it at just the right hour this evening. That was a fortunate piece of good luck and entirely spontaneous. It's a lesson for me that good things will happen if I'm willing to put in the work.

US Fish and Wildlife Service Regional Office in Daphne, AL

This was my turnaround point this evening about 5.7 miles into the walk. Overall, it was a productive and fulfilling day in the air and out on the trail.

Sunrise on the Trail

Another apparently non-eventful day in the books.  I did get to talk for an hour with a friend of mine that I haven't talked to in a while on my evening walk.  It was a good talk as we discussed the hidden troubles and challenges that to a degree haunt us all.

This morning the rain pretty thoroughly drenched me during the first half mile or so, but the weather was kind enough to clear up and allow me to capture a photo of the rising sun on the trail...literally.  The trees were high enough that I couldn't see the sunrise directly, but the reflection in the puddle on the trail let me know it was there and the seemingly constant procession of orbital mechanics hadn't failed me yet.

Sunrise on the Trail - Daphne, AL

I think I've noted it before, but walking has awakened me to the fantastic richness that reflected light brings into my life if I'm observant enough to notice it.

The view made the soaking of the rain worth every drenching minute.

WTF is Going On?

Today was an unsettled day for me.  It's not surprising given the fact that I've been on the road since last Thursday, and tomorrow will be a solid week of relatively nomadic existence.  Nevertheless, it's a bit disconcerting falling back into old habits that I had thought I gotten under wraps.

One of the reasons that I found the pastime of walking so compelling is that I felt it would force me to take life a little slower.  The very nature of the activity would make living in the moment or the surrounding one meter of space easier to accomplish.  One of the characteristics of my mental activity before commencing the practice of walking was to imagine what was going to happen far too far into the future.  In order to deal with that level of delusion and really fantasy, I was hatching schemes upon schemes in a futile attempt to manage the outcomes of whatever damn fool thing my imagination could invent.  That got pretty tiring.

Today, I found myself at various times during the day falling back into that habit of getting to far ahead of myself.  On my evening walk, which I really didn't want to do in the first place, I discovered that I did not have my identification on me.  I felt pretty certain that I'd had it when I struck out on my nocturnal pedestrianism, but halfway through I knew for sure I didn't have it.

For the next three miles I both retraced my steps and let my imagination roam relatively free about what had happened to my ID, what I was going to have to do next to get a new one, what personal financial risks had been incurred.  At the same time, I was searching the ground pretty diligently and imagining that I might know where I'd dropped it.  Of course that was about two miles from where I thought I'd discovered it missing.  This led to a level of impatience and imagination about how I'd feel if I found it in the location or how I'd cope with the mile remaining back to my rooms if I did not find it.  All the while, I was trying to keep my eyes and my mind in the present one meter to make sure I didn't miss the ID just in case I'd dropped it someplace else.

Turns out that it was in my work pants.

All of that anxiety meant nothing except it basically consumed three miles and almost 50 minutes of an activity designed to provide a relief from imagined future anxiety.  Crazy really.

It wasn't all undisciplined worrying.  I did notice that the Eastern Shore Trail sign that had been knocked over by a car several months ago at the intersection near my hotel had been restored to an upright and repaired position.

Restored Eastern Shore Trail Kiosk

This was the very first location that I'd encountered a sign (and the concept) of the Eastern Shore Trail which runs down the eastern shore of Mobile Bay.  This sign, or at least one like it in this location, is what prompted me to search for documentation on the trail and has led to some truly rewarding time in this little narrow section of Alabama.

Seeing this sign restored was like getting one of my guideposts or navigation markers back.  It was a waypoint that I'd not appreciated enough until it was damaged and then subsequently brought back into my consciousness by its renewal.

I've had an amazing last year, and this trail because of this sign has played a major role in bringing the fulfillment of the year to fruition.  

I should probably take my own advice, heed the rhythm of the walk, meet life as it unfolds and not a moment sooner, and stop fretting over just WTF is going on.