Upon returning from long vacations, I typically feel like no time at all has passed here at home. It’s a weird feeling, as if I’ve disappeared Outlander style, yet returned to pick up just minutes from when I left off. It’s not as if I’ve crossed over into some parallel reality for the vacation’s duration – a parallel reality / timeline would proceed apace with my regular one. Rather, it feels as if I’ve jumped to some perpendicular reality/timeline in which my experiences barely overlap with my usual routine. I’ve also found that the longer I’m gone, the more intense this sensation. Years ago, I returned from six weeks away. Everything in my house felt and looked the same except that I had to blink away some strange aura shimmering around all my stuff, as if it had been held in suspension. On my first day back this time, I looked for evidence that my regular life had leapt forward three weeks. I noticed that the saplings newly plant...
Before traveling to the UK, we obsessed over the weather forecasts, figuring that there is no way we wouldn’t experience plenty of rain and/or wind. We came equipped with wet riding gear and the forecasts made it seem like our rain gear would be put to frequent use. But by some miracle, we experienced zero rain from the time we arrived, all through our Backroads tour, and through our Eurobike tour . . . until today. From our hotel this morning, we checked the rain forecast a zillion times (it’s different each time) and were pretty confident that we had a rain-free window from around 11am to 6pm to ride from Kelso to Innerleithen . We set out around 10:45 and within 20 minutes, we were in light mist that morphed into real rain that came and went for most of our 30 mile ride. We stopped at this church and stood under a protective tree for a while but soon realized we just needed to suck it up and go. ...