It's Winter

It's been a cold time for travel. This time last year, my travel responsibilities took me to Arizona for two weeks. This year I am in Northern Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio. The miserable cold does take some of the fun out of the process. I am more inclined to go straight to the hotel, rather than explore. It's hard to even make myself shop!!

After so many winters when I never even took my heavy coat out of the closet, this is an awakening. Windshield scraping was rare. Last week I ended up in Cedar Falls, Iowa with nothing but a jacket and the temperature was a nice ZERO when I awoke. That evening I drove from Cedar Falls to Omaha which is about 4 1/2 hours and realized that if I had car trouble I was in a fix, with no coat or blanket in the car and no 'serviceable shoes'. I think that a cell phone makes me invincible, but there are those spots in the world which do not support cell phone use.

My lodging in Omaha was a guest room in the facility. As I watched the news that evening, I discovered a snow storm was expected to move in the next morning and last throughout the day. Sometimes things just work out. I usually provide only one day at a time at a facility, however, this time I was staying two days. I was already safely ensconced in the building and didn't have to leave until 24 hours after the snow was supposed to stop. When I started home two days later, the sun was out and the highway was clear.

I'm in Ohio this week and it is a deep freeze, too. It snowed yesterday, but today is bright and sunny. My week-end was very hectic and I packed in a rush, forgetting black socks and a black belt. I stopped at the mall here last night and bought the socks (you can never have too many pair of black socks), but I just couldn't force myself to buy another black belt. I already have three. So today, I have the shoe string from my athletic shoes threaded through my belt loops to keep my pants up. I think it's great that the pants are so big that I actually had to have something to keep them up!!