Trip 01: Tampa, Florida

I'm in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I have finally again achieved internet access!  So without further waiting, I present to you Trip 01 Part 1: Tampa, Florida!

Tuesday morning, bright and early (well, so early it wasn't bright yet), Matt proved that he was an amazing boyfriend by dropping me off at the Seattle airport at 4:15am.  E-A-R-L-Y.  I met up with coworker R, made it through security, and boarded a 6am plane to Chicago, where I would make a transfer to a plane taking me to Tampa.

Trip 01 officially began! 

I should interject a bit of background here, before I continue.  I am not what one would call a seasoned traveler. I consider anything in the vicinity of Ohio to be "the East" (I've learned not to tack "Coast" onto that after several years of people pointing out that Ohio is, in fact, land-locked except for that whole Lake Erie thing).  The last time I had to deal with time zones on a trip was in 1997.  The longest flight I actually remember... is about two hours long, from Seattle to San Diego.  While I know I've been on longer before, I don't recall them at all!

So, as I'm sure you have guessed, this summer is proving to be an interesting experience for me!

The flight to Chicago was about four and a half hours long... that's a long time to be in one seat!  Still, flying into Chicago was a lot of fun.  I had a window seat, so I was able to look out over Illinois as we approached Midway and I really enjoyed everything I saw.  I wrote quite a bit in my journal, which I'll quote here:

Flying into Chicago was interesting - Illinois really is flat!

Yes, I am that observant.  Still, for a San Diego/Spokane/Seattle girl, it was odd to see a place scraped even like that.  I'm used to hills and mesas and mountains nowadays, not endless prairie!

Another thing I noticed was the green - and connected to that, the water.  The river didn't seem that long - I don't even know if it was the Chicago - but there were dozens of little ponds and lakes just scattered everywhere.  More trees than I expected, too: great lakes of woodland, and from the air I could watch the rivers of forested land trail off and split into little streams and rivulets that died out eventually into just farmland or suburbia.  It's far more green land than I expected.

Also flat.  Have I mentioned the flat?  From the air I could see for miles, all the different towns with their water towers sticking up over them, names I couldn't read painted on their sides.  I saw one town that was just a small curve where the two-lane road curved itself, and what looked like an old road still visible, heading west, through several fields.

It was surprisingly pretty.  The further east I go, the more it seems like I can just see the years lying on the land.  I looked out over the farmlands and thought about the pioneers that settled them, and wondered about the Native American tribes that originally called these lands home as we passed over the huge swatches of trees that separated towns.  Even as we came into Chicago, the houses made me think of the past - they're different houses there, all narrow brick houses rising three stories or so high, and make me think of ladies in swooshy skirts with parasols and gentlemen in suspenders or top hats.

All in all, for a half-hour approach into the airport, I was definitely taken with Illinois.  Still, we were just there for a little bit between planes, and then it was time to hop down to Florida.  Our bumpy ride continued - I haven't mentioned the turbulence, but that was a theme of the air travel this week!  

It was 91 degrees in Florida when we landed, and then I learned what humidity was.  Whew!  The first thing I did was put on shorts and sandals!

I'm in a hotel!  Exciting, I know. In my defense, I don't have many pictures of Florida!

We met up with my other coworkers (who shall here be referred to as S, J, and D) and had dinner at the hotel cafe, but it was fairly late with the time change, and we didn't do much beyond dinner and settling in.  I very much played the tourist, taking a look at Tampa while I could:

It's greener here than I expected, but a different type of green - kind of a brown and tan green compared to the dark forest green we flew over in Illinois.  Lots of shrub-like trees, and three types of palm trees - the tall ones, the short stubby ones, and ones that remind me of cactus, with the prickly fan leaves from Palm Sunday's weaker processions.  They grow in hug bushes alongside the freeway, bushes the size of living rooms made u of dozens if not hundreds of those fans.

There are [real] trees, too, but they all seem... languid. Most of them have branches that droop back down towards the ground, and even h few that reach upright for the sky have moss dripping down the branches like dried kelp.  Spanish moss, I guess - I've never seen the real thing before, and it gives everything a bit of "haunted mansion" feel, desolate and old and forgotten.  The ivy that climbs the tree trunks looks different, too - smaller, more fanciful leaves and an air of quite, despondent conquest as it both clings to and drapes off of the trees.

Everything's pretty, in a sultry kind of way.  The sunset was hazy, all golden-red ball of fire in the sky, and I tried to take a picture but don't think I quite caught it.

It really looked much more awesome than this.

It's the furthest southeast I've ever been.

Our hotel rooms were very nice - each of us had our own little two-room suite, with a living room and a bedroom with a huge king bed.  I felt kind of bad about it, actually, since I felt like I wasn't using it all!  

Wednesday was a pretty low-key day.  We did a bit of work, but had most of the day to settle in as we saw fit.  D and S and I went to the grocery store to stock up on breakfast food and drinks.  Then we had really good Japanese food for lunch and went back to the hotel.  I, being ambitious, have decided that I am going to attempt to get in shape this summer, so I went to the hotel's exercise room for some running (half a mile in 5:30; ouch) and biking (a mile in 3:30, better).  Hopefully those times and distances will increase greatly as the summer goes on!

I rewarded myself with some time hanging out in the pool with D afterwards, and we had dinner at the same cafe again before we met up with the rest of the crew for a meeting.  After the meeting, we went to the parking lot for the event on Thursday - we were allowed to block it off and start set-up at 9:30pm.  It was a great night going into it, about 85 degrees and with a huge orange full moon out, but before long, the moon started to become eclipsed by clouds...

Had our meeting at 8 and went out to the site at 9:30 - very warm and muggy.  I got to drive the Tahoe - big car!  We unloaded and sweated putting the tent up in the heat, watching a really nice full yellow moon slowly get covered by the clouds, with lightning flickering in the distance.  Just as we were adding the weights [to stabilize the tents], the wind and lightning really picked up - we storm-lashed the tents as much as we could, and in the middle of everything there was a giant crash of lightning and all the lights in the parking lot died.  Then the rain started - a giant torrential downpour of rain, big thick drops.

The aftermath, part 1!

Since there was a weather advisory because of the lightning, we stopped set-up and ran for home.  We were only out in the rain for probably ten minutes, but we were dripping wet and soaked straight through - wetter than when I had gotten out of the pool that afternoon!

Picture chosen to show off crazy rain aftermath... and also awful farmer's tan from the work shirts!

Because we couldn't finish set-up that night, we woke up early Thursday to go back out and set-up before the event.  Everything went very well, even though it was still ridiculously hot!  We were chugging water like it was going out of style, and after the event, during tear-down, things got even crazier trying to stay hydrated and cool:

Towards the end of tear-down, we were resorting to desperate measures to keep even semi-cool: pouring a whole water bottle over our arms, dunking our hats in the cooler ice water [then putting them back on - heaven!], and sticking ice under our ball caps.  All of these worked... for about five minutes!

The event itself went very well - it was my first even of this kind, and it's a bit different from the other ones I've been trained on.  There were many more media at the event than I had expected - even national CNN came out!

I'm fairly sure my image or voice will be on tv at some point soon from all of this - CNN was here this morning, plus all the local stations... I had a microphone wired up to me for a while.  It was kind of funny how unused to media I was - I turned around at one point right into a camera, said, "Sorry!", and tried to get out of the way only to be told, "It's okay, you're what I'm filming right now, you're not in the way."

Like you do.

(I did manage to get myself on tv; send me an email if you want the link to the news story.)

After the event, we rushed back to the hotel.  S, R, and I had to go to the airport right away for a Saturday even in WA (J and D get to drive the trailer over to Atlanta in the meantime).  We had lots of time in the airport - two hours in Tampa and two in Atlanta for our connection.  It was a really late flight into Seattle (we landed at 12:30am Seattle time, which meant for us it was 3:30am!), and combine that with not getting too much sleep the night before due to aborted night set-up and early morning set-up, and I was pretty exhausted!

I will leave you with proof:

The trash cans in the Atlanta airport eat recycling.  Like, you put in recycling and the trash can turns on and sorts and crunches it separately from the trash.  I am untraveled enough to think this is quite possibly both the coolest trash can ever as well as the most disturbing.

Ah, the non-urbane observations of a sleep-deprived traveler...

-Beth