TRAVELING AROUND THE WORLD: Our Tales of Delights and Disasters by Shelley Row Page A

otherworldly feel. And so it was that landing in Los Angeles brought our return to my attention with brut force. Tears filled my eyes when we touched down. I’m not quite ready to be back.
     
    Don’t get me wrong, seeing Linnea at the airport was a wonderful sight. Now we’re on our way to Texas to see my mother, George and friends. That’s all good. Plus, I can’t wait to see our dear friends in Annapolis. I missed the people who fill our life but I’m starting to mourn the end of this experience.
     
    Mike and I both noticed little things, common before but now unusual. For example, we keep expecting to go through passport control. At the Los Angeles airport, it seemed odd to just walk off the plane into the city. Didn’t anyone want to check something – anything? Guess not. Linnea whisked us off to our hotel although “whisked” may be a slight overstatement as we traveled a ten-lane freeway for the first time in a year. All around were enormous cars and trucks. They seem gargantuan by the world’s standards. What is it that we have that others don’t have that we must carry around with us? Our car, which seemed large in Europe, now looks like a Mini Cooper, which, until now, seemed like a normal size.
     
    I stood in line at a fast-food restaurant for the first time in months and fumbled with my U.S. bills. How odd that these bills felt strange. Plus, they are the same color and size – not a well-thought-out system. After staring at my money, I handed it to the impatient, fast-food worker who reluctantly answered my questions. I was one of those pesky customers. It’s not like there wasn’t bad service in France, but, honestly, it happened rarely. As my French teacher explained, sometimes it’s less a difference between the U.S. and France but more a difference between city and country living. I think, in many cases, she’s right. In Cotignac, we knew the butcher, the café owner, the family who ran the Spar market and our favorite market vendors. Fast food literally didn’t exist. I’m still adjusting to the timing of meals. Mike keeps reminding me that we no longer need to allot one and half or two hours to eat out for lunch. Right.
     
    We stayed at a charming hotel in Santa Monica facing the ocean. It was beautiful. In the mornings, we looked out over the beach and ocean. I watched groups of twenty to thirty runners jogging on the path. In France, I was the lone runner. Here, I had company!
     
    Our hotel, The Georgian, reminded us of our hotel facing the Mediterranean in Nice where we stayed on our last night in France. However, as we went from one fabulous restaurant to another over the weekend, I noticed that I felt distracted by conversations at adjacent tables. Everyone was speaking the same language and I understood what they said! That, too, was new and different. Then there was the constant presence of Blackberries. Everyone was spinning that little ball, punching on teeny keyboards, or talking (sometimes far too loudly) into little microphones dangling from their ear. It’s not like we didn’t see cell phones in France but it didn’t seem so pervasive. And you would never interrupt something as sacred as a meal with a Blackberry.
     
    There are also more processed foods here. They were overseas as well but not as prevalent. I had to laugh at the “healthy” snack bar we were given on the plane. The wrapper, covered with photos of fruit, read, “Natural flavors with other natural flavors.” Mike finished reading the sports pages to discover that they were filled with basketball and baseball news. Soccer was relegated to a portion of the last page and rugby and cricket had been thoughtlessly omitted all together. Imagine!
     
    I’ll adjust and it’ll seem normal again, although I’m not sure that I want some of this to be “normal.” We have flown over the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the coast of Australia and New Zealand, and the Pacific Ocean. Now,