Blogging on

It appears I’ve reached a blog milestone.  I wasn’t aiming for it because I wasn’t aware it existed and I’m certainly not pleased about it.  But today ends the day of free blogging for Jennifer.  I’ve reached my Google 1GB free memory storage limit.  After six years of a mixed bag of travel adventures and mishaps, I will need to url hyperlink things or start a new blog or, God forbid, pay $2.99 a month for the privilege of this user space.  Back in the primitive days, I could barely add captions under the pictures.  Now I’ve got to reach new heights (or pay for them).  Thus is the evolution of humanity (and capitalist systems). 

Forgive me. I’m exhausted.  I find myself under the florescent lights and vastly expanded domestic terminal at New York’s JFK airport after an 8.2-hour flight from London, then haul through baggage and trek through terminal 4.  It’s been quite a few years since I’ve sat here. (Actually, this part of the terminal is new so I’ve never sat here, but you get the point).   Six years ago I left this beloved little huge metropolis knowing, but too scared to admit, that’d I’d probably not be back—in the Biblical sense at least.  Six years an expatriate has made me a bit gun shy—the lights are bright, too bright, the American football on the tv seems brash and foreign, the universal-bar-grill-restaurants that dot the terminal look like cookie cutters of each other and I feel out of place.  It will pass.  It always does. 

But this time around I’ve got a layover on the way to Detroit to mull it all over.  As much as I’m that person I was six years ago, I’m just as much not.  Which sounds like such a load of BS.  And this is not the forum for that level of self-indulgent psychobabble.  Travel self-indulgence, yes.  The rest, not so much. 

So I’ll just end on this.  When I moved to Edinburgh in 2004 I improvised a series of wall and door decorations like you do when you’re a college student.  And on the door, I left a little cutout next to my customary dry-erase-leave-me-a-message-because-I’m-not-here-board.   It read: ‘Travel broadens the mind.’

Thank God.   Because even reading about travel broadens the mind.  So get with it, Google, because I plan on doing this for a while yet.