Another day, another five hundred miles

The boys are off again today, visiting college campuses. Up until a week ago, Wiley had only seen one college campus, that of our alma mater Rice University. Before he narrows down his choices next year, we wanted him to get a feel for campuses of different sizes.

Last week, they went north, visiting Austin College in Sherman, Texas and the University of Oklahoma in Norman. They were gone about twelve hours, covered about 500 miles.

Today will be the same, except they've headed south - first to Baylor University in Waco, then to Southwestern University in Georgetown and finally the University of Texas at Austin.

A five hundred mile day trip is no big deal for a Texan. Throw some cold drinks in the cooler and head out. I have often gone up to see my parents for a day - three and a half hours each way. On other family trips, we will routinely drive 1,000 miles in a day, leaving Orlando or Tucson or Keystone at 6:00 am and sleeping in our own beds that same night.

One summer day, when the kids were a lot younger, I made the six hour round trip to Abilene to pick up kids at camp, then made another two hour round trip to pick up another child at a different camp, then headed north with the whole family to spend the weekend with my folks.

That's what you do if you live in the south - a land of vast open space and scarce urban areas.

When Ricky and I were newlyweds living in Chicago, our best friends had family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, about 150 miles away. They would plan their annual trip months ahead of time, it was such a long way to them. That was the first time I really understood cultural differences.

In England last summer, I visited with a woman on the train. She was quite smug about the British rail system, with its superiority to transportation in the United States. I agreed with her, to the extent you have towns, existing for centuries, every five or ten miles. Our country is quite young and nowhere near as densely populated. It will be centuries more before it is both cost and environmentally effective to build transportation infrastructure outside the packed cities. Give us some time, we'll get there.

I wish our current government leaders would realize that. Instead, we're led by a man who has lived either on a small island or in a large city. For the past five years, he has only traveled locally by cab or limousine, his driving limited to golf carts. He should take a look at a map. His concept of efficient transportation does not apply to the majority of us Americans, sprawled across thousands of miles, who want to remain independent, able to transfer at will from Point A to Point B.

That's why I've started a slush fund. At the first hint of the phaseout of SUV's, I'm stockpiling three of them.

Trigger Happy

This is how we were on our trip.

Wiley is taking a picture of us while we take a picture of him. And Mr. Photogenic knows how to take a picture without hiding his own charm and good looks. It's a wonder he avoided carpal tunnel syndrome, with all the button pushing he was doing. He took about 2,000 pictures on vacation. It would have been far more if he had not been limited by all the venues that prohibited photography. I shouldn't have been surprised. On Christmas Day he took over 800 pictures with his new camera.

Recording our lives is so easy now. Everyone has a digital camera or a cell phone camera and pocket size video recorders are common. Pictures are immediately posted and shared in so many domains and formats you can't list them all. On our trip we downloaded cameras to our laptop every night.

When I was twenty, I went to Hawaii with my family, accompanying my dad on a business trip. I took my Kodak pocket camera with my 24 exposure roll of 110 film and rationed my pictures over the week we were there. It took some deliberation to decide which scene was photo worthy. After returning from my trip I sent the film off for mail order processing, in order to minimize the significant expense of developing. I have some beautiful pictures of the Haleakala Crater on Maui that I still look at. The other pictures were special or unique in other ways. During my college years I only used a few rolls of film. Receiving prints back from the developer was an "event," allowing me to relive the moments photographed. Good times.

I have virtually no pictures from the first three years of marriage, living on one income while paying substantial law school costs. For my first birthday after the advent of dual gainful employment, I received a fantastic 35mm camera and began photography with abandonment. Shortly after that we inherited about $1,500 and used it to buy a video camera so that we could record family scenes with our new baby. I've taken and printed thousands and thousands of pictures and recorded hundreds of hours of video, upgrading cameras over the years. The closet under the stairs is completely full of photos and tapes. I am slowly adjusting now to images on screens rather than paper, and that's probably a good thing. I have no more closet space.

But, save special occasion like our recent London trip, I take far fewer pictures than in the past, even though technology makes it much easier. A few years ago I realized that sometimes you can be so busy recording life that you don't really get to enjoy it or appreciate it and have difficulty recalling it. Would I rather snap away during a kid's ball game, or would I rather watch it and watch the game and cheer and clap and focus on the effort and the expressions? What we see through a lens is not the same as what we see when we are involved. I would find myself trying to anticipate the next great photo shot rather than actually watching the game. Or I would be unnaturally quiet, not wanting to hear myself later on a video recording, rather than cheering and supporting.

In family gatherings I was often on the fringes, taking pictures rather than visiting and playing. Once I was so involved video-ing my children in a play pool in the backyard that it was probably a minute before I realized that my daughter was struggling and in real danger. I was so busy watching through the camera, making sure the picture was framed and centered, that I didn't notice my child was underwater.

So now my camera doesn't stay an arm's length away. Even on our vacation, I left it in the hotel room a couple of days. And our fourth child won't have as many pictures of himself doing cute or silly things. He won't have as many video recordings of his games as his siblings have. There should still be enough, I think, to vividly recall the past to mind, and that's what's important.

I'm not sure who will look at all those pictures and videos, anyway. We're too busy living, absorbing and being truly part of each others' lives to record and watch it all the time.

Blessing in Disguise

I live in the flat world of north Texas. My son has a second floor bedroom, but I don't go there. I was not prepared for our vacation.

After being in London for a few days, I've climbed several thousand stairs.

How so? To begin with, London is hilly with a river running through it, so stairs and inclines are everywhere. Underneath London there is a network of tunnels for several layers of trains. Scooting around London on these "tube" lines means up and down stairs to change altitude. (Is it altitude if you are underground?)

Using a bus means a climb to sit on the top deck. The tourist sites include steps - whether it's climbing the turrets of the Bloody Tower or the White Tower at the Tower of London, climbing down to and up from Churchill's bunkers, climbing the steps from street level to bridge across the Thames, or climbing the 530 steps to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral.

And in a moment of insanity, I descended halfway down from the top of St. Paul's only to go back to the top one more time to take a picture I missed the first time. Actually, it was to take a picture my son decided he wanted. He owes me, big time. It is a neat picture, though, a picture of the floor of the cathedral you could take through a peephole, and I'm glad we have it.

Every time we eat fast food we order our food on the ground floor and then eat at tables either upstairs or downstairs. And there are 44 stair steps from the hotel lobby to our third floor hotel room, which we climb at least three times a day.

I cannot adequately describe how intensely my legs and ankles and feet hurt after five days in London.

On our sixth day, we take a day trip to Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. The nearly two hour train ride, sitting down, is pleasant. The climb to the second level of the bus is manageable. The leisurely stroll around the gentle slope of Stonehenge is pleasant.

We spend some time at Old Saren Castle, with some slopes to climb, but nothing difficult. Then we head back to the town of Salisbury, with the primary agenda to see the Salisbury Cathedral. It's peak is the tallest in England. There are 345 steps up to the base of the steeple.

When we arrive at the cathedral we discover that the tower can only be climbed as part of the guided tour, which is already full for the day. So I'm left on the ground with the common folk, impressed and awed, but a little disappointed that the climb will have to wait for another time.

Disappointed, that is, until I wake up the morning of day seven and, miracle of miracles, nothing hurts!

Bataan Death March

That's what my husband says we're doing. We're not. We're on vacation. In the first two full days of London we have toured the Tower of London, walked the Tower Bridge, climbed to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral (some of us twice), seen "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (standing against the stage) at the Globe Theatre, walked up and down and around Hampton Court, spent an hour or so at the British Museum, watched the private Ceremony of the Keys at the closing of the Tower and walked and walked and walked......

I'm not surrendering yet, but it's close.