En Route to Enchantment
Trains, boats, and robot luggage?
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Have fabric, will travel
Darlene and I are on a Southwest flight from RSW to DEN today, arriving in about an hour. We plan to have lunch at Root Down, a favorite Denver International Airport restaurant from our two decades in Mile High. From there we will catch a Southwest flight to Albuquerque and a shuttle van to Santa Fe.
I’m toting my usual light arsenal of tech gadgets. Darlene checked two big bags, one with clothes and such, the other full of gorgeous fabric and three quilts-in-progress.
For the next eight days, she will be making fabric-collage art at a Susan Carlson workshop. I will be her companion and tech support. We also brought pickleball gear, because there are courts within walking distance of our hotel.
At the Fort Myers airport, we spotted a boy riding a suitcase.
His father said they’d bought it at the Istanbul airport, so this kid gets around. The conveyance is an SE3S Smart Riding Luggage Electric Suitcase Scooter, available at Amazon for $879.
When I was that boy’s age, I took an unforgettable train trip on the Santa Fe Chief from Amarillo, Texas, to Boston.
Thus was born a lifelong lover of trains. My sister and I traveled with our mother on that trip to visit family back in Massachusetts. This was during the year we lived in Pampa in the Texas Panhandle—a transfer and a big promotion for Dad early in his corporate career.
Sleeper car. Observation car. White linen tablecloths in the dining car. Magic from start to finish.
That train ride wired me to expect transformations and adventures every time I travel.
New Mexico is the Land of Enchantment. Darlene and visited Taos and Santa Fe several times when we lived in Denver.
A magical mentor of mine, the late Alvaro Cardon-Hine, lived and shared a painters’ studio in Truchas, on the High Road to Taos, with his wife, Barbara McCauley. Darlene and I traveled with Alvaro and Barbara to Costa Rica, where he tutored me in poetry and life.
The boy in me loves to travel.
He is willing to change, eager to write some new poems and to be of use to the quilter he has been roaming the world with for more than 40 years.