Rock Stars

We felt like rock stars. As we taxied away from the runway after landing at the Buffalo general aviation airport, men with orange vests and official looking flags waved us to our parking spot. He shooed families in fold-out chairs away so that we could turn the aircraft off the taxiway and onto the grass strip that became the parking ramp. Strangers came up to help us push the plane into its spot. Okay. So writing this really doesn't convey the excitement of the moment, but honestly, we felt like rock stars.

To back up a bit, Tim started working on his commercial rating while we were still in Albuquerque, and a few months ago he started up again here. He's been flying longer than he's been driving – since he was fourteen. It's part of who he is. In the months when we first got here and he wasn't flying again yet, it was like a part of him was withering away. As soon as he started again, he was a new person.

Or maybe it was just the weather.

Anyway, we rented a single engine airplane from the FBO where he's been taking his lessons. If you ask me what the letters FBO stand for, I'll have to shrug my shoulders. I'm working on my fluency in pilot-speak, but I still have a long way to go. Buffalo is only about a half hour flight from Flying Cloud airport, where our plane (and the FBO) is based, so almost immediately after we got off the ground we started hearing radio traffic out of Buffalo, and the traffic controller managing a fairly heavy load of traffic. Maybe it was that tension of merging into so much air traffic that heightened our sense of excitement and made us feel like rock stars.

Apparently the french toast at the airshow was phenomenal, and a major draw in itself. Although we were hungry, by the time we got there the line was enormous -- it would have taken over an hour to get to the front. We weren't that hungry for french toast.



So we wandered around and watched the comings and goings of all the people at the show. It was surprisingly crowded – families and couples, pilots and young men yearning to be pilots, old and young. Most of the people came by car, not plane, and we heard that they had run out of parking.



Our timing was impeccable. By the time we wandered back over to where we had our seats in front of our plane, we didn't have long to wait before the airshow started. The airshow itself wasn't huge – only two airplanes. But man, they put on impressive shows. The acrobatics were astonishing.



We're planning to head to Oshkosh this summer, which is the mega fly-in. We're planning to stay there for a few days at least, so we'll have to drive. Rental airplanes are pricey enough to begin with but they get really expensive really quickly when you're talking about overnight trips. Man, we've got to figure out how to get our own plane someday.

I was moderately interested in going to Oshkosh before our trip to Buffalo, but now I'm really excited about the trip. And the even better news is that my parents are planning to join us there. I think they'll love it too, and it'll be fun to share it with them. Without the airplane, maybe we won't feel like rock stars, but I think we'll have a great time anyway!



See the rest of the photos here.

Saturday Morning In Uptown

A few years ago I wrote an essay for one of my classes that attempted to answer the question, “Why do I travel.” Although I've always loved traveling, it was a question that I'd never really thought to consider and writing the essay was thought provoking. To me it was like asking the question, “Why do I breathe?” Because if you're living and loving life, that's what you do. I love taking in a new place, figuring out what makes Sydney different from Boston. Berlin different from New York.

One of my favorite ways of immersing myself in a new place is what I've come to think of as a deríve – basically a long, meandering walk. Typically I'll have couple destinations in mind, I'll know the rough direction I need to travel to make it from one waypoint to another, and then I'll just set off. See what adventures waylay me along the journey. On my first weekend in London, I set off from my bed and breakfast at around 7 after a full English breakfast of tomatoes and beans and sausage, and didn't get back until long after dinner. By the end of the day, I'd been to Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Westminster, Trafalgar Square, the Tate Modern, and Shakespeare's (newly rebuilt) Globe Theater. I had even climbed to the top of St Paul's Cathedral to admire the vistas of the city. Many of those destinations were places that I returned to over and over during the two years I lived in England, and the mental map I built on the weekend was the foundation upon which I built all the rest of the knowledge I eventually acquired about the city.



But for all the spatial knowledge that these walks provide about a new place, I feel like the real soul of a place is revealed in the chance encounters you have along the way. That same weekend in London, I took the Tube from near the end of a line into the center of the city. When I got on, I was nearly the only person in the car. A couple of stops later, an older gentlemen got in and sat down a few seats away. We sat in silence for a few stops, both of us watching the scenery of brick suburban row houses flow past us. Suddenly he turned to me, and said, “You never know what will happen in the blink of your pretty little blue eye.” Then he turned back forward, and continued on as if he'd never spoken.



I took in his statement with a little bit of confusion mixed with a fair bit of delight. Although I didn't know what to make of it, I felt like the encounter had somehow given me a small glimpse into the soul of the place. I would never see the man again, but I felt as if he had set me off onto my adventure in London. I felt connected and rooted and even though I knew the feeling was illusionary and ephemeral, that chance encounter opened my eyes to see the mystery, energy, and timelessness that I now associate so closely with the city.



All this to say that I truly value the chance encounters you have while getting to know a new place. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I went to visit Uptown for my weekly photo expedition. I came early on a bright spring Saturday morning. Tim once described the Uptown area to me as having all the atmosphere and energy of a campus area, but without the campus. After getting to know the area myself, I completely agree. In afternoons and evenings, most of the people walking around look like the too-cool-for-school kids – studiously not fashion-conscious. It's lined with popular hang-out bars and cafes, and I imagine it's pretty busy on a Friday night.



But on this Saturday morning, the streets were nearly empty. I like to wander around places like this early on weekend mornings. In some places, you see people out cleaning the streets, and vendors getting their wares ready for sale. But in Uptown, I saw homeless people, vagrants, transients. I'm not sure what the respectful word was, but they all seemed kind. When I stopped a waited for a bus to come because I wanted a particular shot, one man came over to make sure I was okay. He said that I looked lost.

But an encounter I had with another man was what made me start thinking about the man that I met on the Tube in London. When this man in Uptown walked up to me, I nearly turned him away before he could even speak. I usually prefer not to give money to individuals on the streets, and there was something of entreaty in his face as he walked up to me. But it was a beautiful day and there was also something joyful in his face, so I decided to listen to what he had to say. He was a homeless man, trying to earn money to pay for his medication to treat diabetes. He said he doesn't like to ask for money directly, saying he'd rather earn it through poems or a song. Would I let him earn some money? At first, I tried to stall, having not yet decided what I wanted to do. He offered to show me a good place to take a picture, and so we started walking down the block. While we were walking I decided to give in to the moment, and told him I rather hear a poem than a song. Gospel or Love? Gospel. With that he started reciting a poem and his steps subtly changed cadence to match the rhythm of his verse. I wish that I could remember the words of his poem. I am no judge of poetry, but his recitation had soul and sincerity that brought joy to my morning. After he pointed out the photo viewpoint, I gave him some money and a bus ticket I had. I was all the richer for our encounter.

I'm not sure what my time with that man can tell me about the soul of Uptown Minneapolis, but I know that I had a happiness and a fundamental belief in humanity that morning after meeting him.



A note. This essay is very, very belated. I took the photos over three weeks ago. When I started the writing to accompany the photos I took, I ended up going a completely different direction than I intended, which (I suppose) is one of the joys of this forum. I've included some pictures from a 2006 trip to England that Tim and I took, just to set the mood. If you want to see other photos from that trip (and a few others), go here. And if you'd like to see the rest of my photos from my morning in Uptown, go here. I'll be publishing a few more posts very soon, as I've got photos from two other photo expeditions.