A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Day 0 - "In Summer"

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

5/27/16, “In Summer”

Newark Liberty International Airport, New Jersey (EWR)

This is the twelfth entry I have written from this airport.  When I set out to see the world, it was the Summer of 2012, before I even began this Travelogue, and that summer, over the course of two months, I found myself at this airport eight times.  It was the summer of the London 2012 Olympics, the stadium of which I will be visiting in two more weeks.  That trip will be called “Harry Potter: The Experience”, and I will be meeting one of my dearest friends there, whom I actually first met that summer, but setting foot inside the London 2012 Stadium, the Stadium I tried so hard to visit in January 2014, is as big of a draw.

Returning to the Summer of 2012, it was epic Summer of Travel, and I visited Kentucky and Tennessee with my immediate family, Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma with my friend Stu, I took 17 days off from everything to watch the London Games, then Florida and Georgia and South Carolina, and then I went to a sci-fi convention in Atlanta.  It was an epic Summer of Travel.

Including a trip to Mexico, my epic Eurotrip, another epic trip to Minnesota and Montana and the Dakotas, two trips to Northern Canada to see two World Heritage Sites and the Northern Lights, and Bermuda The Summer of 2013 was even more epic, and I thought surely I would never have a more epic Summer of Travel.

I was wrong, the Summer of 2014 was just as epic, with trips to Japan, Alaska and Yukon, Washington and British Columbia, Colorado, and Barcelona and Andorra, and again, I thought no Summer of Travel could ever again possibly be so epic.

I’m sure my reader can guess that the Summer of 2015 was just as epic as the ones that preceded it.  It begin in Stockholm and Helsinki, then Maine (for the third year in a row), then the Last Great Summer Road Trip Adventure with my mother to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks and the Canadian Prairie on my own, Ohio and Kentucky with some friends on a roadtrip, my friend’s bachelor party in Cuba, back to Mexico to see the Guadalajara region, and, of course, spending my birthday at Victoria Falls in Africa.  Yeah, that was just as epic.

However, when I closed out my Summer of Travel for 2015, I knew that 2016 promised to be even more epic, and now it begins.  It is starting now.  Over the course of this weekend and the following four, I will be revisiting places from when I was growing up, even staying in some of the exact same hotels.  Monday night I will be staying at the same hotel in Athens we stayed at in 2004, next Saturday we will be staying at a hotel by Penn I stayed at with my mother when I was considering applying there, so I suppose that was 2005.  The next weekend, in London, I will be staying at the Savoy, which we stayed at when we visited London in 2000 (and again when I visited in 2014), the weekend after, well, my parent’s house, the same I house I lived in those years, then, the weekend after, I will be going to Maine and staying in the same hotel we did the first time I visited Maine.

The weekend after that, Nova Scotia and Prince Edwards Island.  A couple of weeks after that, I’ll be going to Pittsburgh and West Virginia on another roadtrip with my friend Stu.  After that, I’ll be going to Rio, for the Olympics, and I could not possibly imagine a more epic trip.  For Labor Day, I’m contemplating a return to Mexico.  Then, for my birthday, a “Roman Holiday”.  Yeah, this Summer of Travel might be my most epic one yet, but my reader would be making a safe bet if he or she thinks the Summer of 2017 will be even more epic.

What is it about summer that makes for such epic travel?  Why are those three and a half months from Memorial Day to my birthday such a special time?  The weather, of course, is warmer, and, in the North, the days are long, really long, 24 hours long if you go far enough worth and are close enough to the solstice.  It is such a wonderful time to visit the North, and while I will not being as far north this summer as I have the past three years, I will be visiting Wales and Nova Scotia (and Prince Edward Islands).  Next summer will take me very far north, to Iceland and Greenland, where I will have 24 hours of sunlight.  Places stay open later and have better visiting hours in summer.  There’s no school in summer.  Everything about summer just makes me want to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible and in as many places as possible.

There are no trips to beach for me in summer.  Instead, it about exploring and taking advantage of the nice weather to explore the great outdoors.  In about 12 hours, I will be attempting to visit the 2004 Olympic Stadium in Athens, 24 hours after that, the site of the Colossus of Rhodes, which will mark the last site of the Wonders of the Ancient World I have to visit, another 24 hours after that, the 1896 Stadium in Athens, and then flying home 24 hours later.  24 hours after that, I’ll be back at the office.  That’s the whole trip.

So, what happened during Day 0?  Well, last night I saw the new X-Men movie, which was pretty bad, and the laundromat was closed when I got out.  I lit up a Juan Lopez and backed up my data and packed my computer bag.  I had to wake up early this morning to pick up my laundry, finish packing, and get ready, and I had an inspection, too.  I got back to the office, finished some stuff up, and then there was a street fair on 43^rd Street, so that’s where I got my lunch, which was delicious, but I bought too much food, and I couldn’t finish it.  I it up a Cohiba while I was finishing my food and headed to the cigar shop, where I awaited my car.

The car picked me up, and I was busy on my phone, so I didn’t realize where she was taking me until I saw the Freedom Tower.  Wait, no, why wasn’t she taking me to the Lincoln Tunnel?!?  Why were we south of the Holland Tunnel?!?  She had taken the FDR drive all the way down and looped around to the West Side Highway!!! No, no, no.  She said cross-town traffic was 40 minutes.  Yeah, well, this “shortcut” of hers took 45 minutes, and it was another 45 minutes to get to the airport.  She cost herself her tip with that “shortcut”, and I was fuming.  I still had plenty of time, though, and it was over three hours before my flight.

I had been dreading the TSA line, but I think they had managed to ameliorate the problems, and I also think I was in some kind of Premiere Access line.  The whole process took 10 minutes, and I headed to my gate, stopping for a cup of coffee.  I sat down, realizing it was the same gate (or adjacent gate) from which I had flown to Belize last year, and I found a seat by the outlets, where I proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can publish before my flight.