There and Back Again

I’m back.

The first six photos above were taken during my recent visit to New Zealand. The rest are from yesterday here in Ohio.

It was a wonderful time in New Zealand. The one fly in the ointment was that halfway into my visit I tripped on the sidewalk in a shopping center and landed with a lot of my weight on my right hand, bending it backwards and rendering it pretty much unusable for the rest of the trip. A visit to Urgent Care showed that no bones were broken, thank goodness, but a week and a half later it’s not completely better. Mostly better, but still weird.

I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed by that turn of events. I had wanted to take so many more photos, and there was just no way that was going to happen (although I could manage to take some with my phone). But, I knew I’d be back. Those photos will just have to wait. And I knew there was a lesson in there for me too – something about how things can change in the blink of an eye, and how we take so much for granted on a day-to-day basis, like two hands that work properly.

The return trip was pretty uneventful, although I had to rely on the kindness of strangers to help me stow my carry-on bag in the overhead storage bins. Also, the zipper on an outer pocket of my trusty backpack died at the very beginning of my trip back (I caught it right away and moved everything from that pocket), so I got to hear many kind strangers tell me, “Your bag’s unzipped!”

I arrived back at 10pm-ish last Sunday night, to a cold, rainy midwest October. It took me the whole week to re-enter my life here, but this weekend was absolutely gorgeous and I finally got back into the swing of things. I’m able to manage the big camera really well now, with no pain in my boo-boo hand. Yesterday morning I visited a trail I had never been to before as well as visiting Beaver Marsh in the early evening, and this morning I returned to Beaver Marsh. It was sooooo cold when I first got there this morning, and I met up with some of the other “regulars” there to complain about the cold and compare notes about what’s been seen there recently. There have been some bald eagles hanging out right off the trail lately (which none of us saw today), and I showed a very blurry photo I took yesterday of what I thought was not a beaver or a muskrat but a river otter, and they all agreed it was an otter – or the Loch Ness monster far from home; it really was pretty blurry. I feel like these people are becoming friends, and that makes me happy.

I hope you have a wonderful week, friends. Thanks for visiting.

Love,

Michelle xoxo