10:30 AM
On A Monday
Oklahoma City, OK
I’m furiously getting ready – showering/packing/mentally preparing and Boozin Susan shouts at me from the dining room, “Lori, come in here for a sec.”
L: “Mom, I’m kind of busy. What do you need?”
B: “Just come here.”
I walk into the dining room to find my mother staring at a globe, brow furrowed, looking awfully perplexed. Said globe, mind you, still denotes Eastern Europe as the USSR.
B: “Now… Where exactly are you going?”
After this we get into a long discussion about South American geography, where “that big statue of Jesus” is located, where the drug cartels hang out and where I’ll be in relation to them.
So where exactly am I going?
My friend, Jenny (Yenny) and I are setting out on a three-week adventure of epic proportions to Peru, Argentina, and Colombia. In Peru, we’ll stay in Piura at Santísimo Sacramento parish again for a week, then head to Buenos Aires and stay in a hostel for week (like the legit backpackers that we are), and finally in Colombia we are going to stay with some friends of Yenny’s.
It’s kind of a last minute trip (well last minute in terms of actual itinerary planning, purchasing of plane tickets, hostel reservations, etc., but I’ve been dead set on taking this trip over since the day I got back from Peru in July). After looking over my last blog entries, I realize I kind of (really, always, incessantly) complain… a lot. So as part of my New Year’s Resolution, I've decided to focus more on the positive. I haven’t even arrived to my final destination and I’ve already been given two situations in which to practice my newfound perspective:
1) I’m making a last minute trip to Wal-Mart the morning before I leave. No matter how meticulously I pack and consult packing lists and play the packing game with Boo (where she asks random items that I need and I confirm that they are in my suitcase. I swear by this method. I will not go anywhere without first playing the packing game), I always end up frantically running to Wal-Mart for something that I’ve forgotten. It’s about 9:00 am, I’m feeling good about life, excited, optimistic, good song on the radio, and then I spill my coffee all over the interior of my car. And it wasn’t like huge swerve, slamming on the brakes coffee spill, it was just set the cup down sideways and it leaked all over the cup holders. What a way to start the day. Instead of cursing my clumsiness under my breath, I think for a second, this isn’t just any coffee. This is Curt’s special brewed, hazelnut deliciousness that makes me salivate in the morning when I drift back into consciousness after a restful night’s sleep in my very comfortable bed. This aroma stimulates nothing but happiness in me. I could pay a couple of dollars for an air freshener for a scent not even half this good. So there you go, spilt coffee = instant (and free) air freshener for my car, so I didn’t even bother to clean it up.
2) NO PERSONAL TV SCREENS ON THE FLIGHT TO LIMA. To be honest, I was livid. I’m not proud of the fact that a seeming trivial detail of my trip could rock me to the core, but I have an obsession with personal screens on flights. In all of my travels (ha, like I’m some really cool, savvy traveler), I’ve only experienced this phenomenon once. I texted Ryan to relay my horror. He, too, was equally appalled and instructed me to demand a partial refund. Now I’m not going to go that far, but you bet your ass I’m going to write a very forceful letter. Later in the flight, as I’m reading Eat Pray Love (that girl’s got nothin me), listening to all of my favorite guilty pleasure Glee music on my iPod (that George so graciously put on there for me), comfortably nestled between Yenny and Cool Asian With Hipster Glasses, all the while glancing up to catch glimpses of the breathtaking beauty that is Zac Efron in Charlie St. Cloud, I realize… this is all the entertainment I need.
More to come later. But for now a few pictures...
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| Getting beers in the Houston airport because Jenny is recently 21 and because we can. |
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| Where my screen should have been... |
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| Our arrival in Piura. A preview of what's to come. I'm hugging Victor so fiercely that it's possible I may very well be strangling him. |
You would think with my obsession for blogs I would know how to comment but... I don't.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to be the first to comment on your post and tell you that I miss you already! I couldn't help but notice how creative, cute, and oh so "kelly hamptonish" you our sounding already!
Your biggest reader,
Katherine
Dude, when you were talking about that globe I was so pumped up, cuz like your mom, I love, scratch that, I’m beyond loving at this point that there is not even a word in the dictionary to describe how much I freaking love staring at snow globes but then I found out you were talking about the map kind so huge letdown I thought I had bonded with your mom for a second. Then I was gonna say something else but I see someone has already commented so I gotta to check out my competition for comments and I’m reading and I’m like who is this Kelly Hampton and am I so old now I’m losing touch with things. So I look her up, and if this is the Kelly you are talking about, I hate you KG for keeping this epic find to yourself. So I’m looking at her webpage and this is what I see, “visionary (badass), angel communicator (way balla), ascension energy star healing founder (I don’t even know what that means but sounds freakin awesome), then comes this epic title: psychic detective holy crap that is so awesome I thought those only existed on CSI. So I am way way way intrigued at this point, this girl sounds so badass I keep reading and this straight from her bio “STAR HEALING INTERGALATIC ENERGY PRACTITIONER” holy crap that is so awesome sounding and its in all caps who does that except for huge badasses like Oprah, I want to believe this is real so badly its not even funny. Seriously, this on there, I just copy pasted this: She is a third-generation metaphysician who works with the angelic and ascended-master realms. You cannot make this stuff up I am so boggled right now. Yeah so sorry about that I guess I am the last person to know who Kelly Hampton is, still don’t get the context of her name drop. So back to comments. So you bring the tv screen argument up again but you are overlooking something way more cooler, the airplane catalogs, and from your pic, there appears to be an epic, thousand page mammoth read where your screen should have been. There are so many crazy things in those things they are way more interesting than playing trivia against the other passengers. Anyways, there is at least one winner in this post I’m jealous of, and that winner is of course the coffee cup, for even though it was only a matter of seconds, it must of felt like an eternity for that coffe cup to have the pleasure of being held by your hand. Well I guess there may be one other thing, and its totally topical so it’s a legit question especially for future travelers out of will rogers, and that is, did you get your junk checked by the TSA?
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