Twenty three hours in the air.

Three movies (Star Trek, Wolverine, Monsters vs. Aliens), 2 delicous Korean meals, 1 full IPOD battery, 10 games of chess against the computer, 2 sleeping pills, and 1 complete book later and I was walking off the plane only 10 minutes from my house in Lexington, Kentucky tired but mostly sane. Mostly.

I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Sure, I was only gone a little over 5 months this trip, but every time I come back I am just a little bit more nervous than the last time.  My body, a jetlagged piece of meat, had been carried back to the US, but my heart and consciousness were still somewhere in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand….

All those worries and reservations soon disolved as I was greeted by my smiling family in the airport.

Luckily, I came in during the afternoon on a sunny, beautiful Fall day.  The first thing I noticed was how different the air smells here at home than in Asia.

My eyes were already itching with good old Kentucky allergies and when I dropped my 15KG rucksack into the back of the car, I knew that tomorrow I wouldn’t have to get up and pack it or strap it on.  It was a strange sensation, but welcome.

I was home.

My second day here I ate Pad Thai (yes, I even eat noodles in the US), and paid $8.00 for it.

Yep, I’m home!

I haven’t written in an extended amount of time….not even one of my usual “Still Alive” posts.  I could say that I have been incredibly busy (which is true) with family, social reconnections, selling what is left of my possessions, and working to save money for Colombia, but the truth is that I just didn’t really know what to write.

So many feelings, thoughts, memories, and plans are tearing my brain apart – and I just haven’t had enough time to compress it all into words properly.  So much for my writing ability!

I can say that this homecoming has been a far softer landing than ones in the past, mostly because I have reconnected with old pre-vagabonding friends that have kept my head in the clouds. Also, already holding a ticket to a brand new continent and knowing how much I have to accomplish before then has kept my head spinning.

I leave in 3 weeks for Colombia, a once semi-dangerous country where I cannot speak the language, know very little about, and have no plan or budget for whatsoever.

This should be interesting. 

I’m slowly but surely going back and adding photos to my old posts on here now that I have the bandwidth to upload 2000+ photos.  In the meantime, if you would like to see photos from my recent trip to Indonesia, Malaysia, East Timor, Singapore, and Thailand – check out my adventure album.

Sorry for being MIA the last 20 days, I’m still alive, and you guessed it….

Life is good!