Packed And Unpacked

No travel journal is complete without the final denouement, the account of returning home.  It is always difficult coming home, though joyous, because of all the work involved in getting started again at ordinary life.  I left Bogota, Colombia last night at around midnight and tried to sleep on a night flight, in an aisle seat where I was constantly being bumped and jostled by passengers with weak bladders making their midnight pilgrimage to the lavatory.  I would be just drifting into a relatively sound stage of sleep when some very clumsy and unaware person would simply walk into me as if I wasn't there.  I got so annoyed that with some of my assailants I would simply respond by jabbing my elbow into their backside as they stumbled past.  I also had to argue with customs officials, especially with a rather punctilious young woman at the Bogota airport who tried to convince me that my golf umbrella was too much like a dangerous weapon to be permitted onboard the aircraft or even in the cargo hold.  We argued in Spanish, I insisted that I brought my umbrella here from Vancouver and I expected to bring it back with me.  I am proud to say that my dear brolly once again adorns a corner by the door of my apartment.

In Dallas Fort Worth I was told that the small jar of mermelada mora, a kind of South American blackberry jam, was too big and I had to have it checked with my duffle bag.  After going through the humiliating and sometimes hilarious rigmarole of emptying my pockets, taking off my shoes, removing my belt and praying that my jeans would stay up while getting patted down and touched in ways that seemed almost sinful by officious customs workers, I had to take my jar of Colombian jam to the check-in counter for American Airlines, only to have to go through the same degrading rigmarole of everything but a striptease to get back into the departures lounge.

On the connecting flight to Vancouver, from another aisle seat, I did my best to tolerate the bump and grind of clumsy passengers running to the lavatory while drifting in and out of sleep.  In the Vancouver International Airport I was not able to locate my jar of jam, decided it wasn't worth it, and consoled myself that in my duffle bag was also a jar of the same kind of jam, three quarters full and surely that would be enough.  I struggled onto the Canada Line train with my heavy luggage, since there were no taxis available and I could at least console myself about saving more than thirty dollars.  While getting off my seat at my station I persuaded the Latina woman seated next to me to please stand instead of just moving her legs given my quantity of baggage.  She seemed perplexed about my good Spanish and I mentioned I just returned from Colombia.

Everything is unpacked and I am exhausted.  I did some grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning and eating and luxuriating in enjoying my own cooking again.  Bogota seems already a distant dream as the reality of daily life now claims and swallows me on this beautiful day full of new leaves and flowers of a precocious Vancouver spring day.