Hello, whoever’s out there.

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve put up a proper post.  This spring, and the lead-up to this spring, has been rather a lot.  And there’s a good chance there will be another long gap between this post and whatever goes up after it.

To paint a general picture, I will just say that between last November and now I have:  1) Surmounted the hurdles of two very large projects, one for work and one for outside-of-work; 2) Flown out-of-state five times; And 3) lost two (nearly three) very dear and entirely separate relatives.  (I’ve also acquired and planted four trees and two blackberry bushes, but it is springtime, so…)  Coming up, I’m looking at three more out-of-state trips to be accomplished this summer (one-per-month!), and am seriously contemplating adding one or two more trips for afterwards in the fall, taking into account the sort of message these recent sorts of happenings tend to impart (i.e., I live in the middle of the country, while most of my close friends and family, outside the immediate, live everywhere else, and I maybe shouldn’t rest on my laurels about that).

I don’t want to go into more detail than that, partly because it would just come out like whining, and I do believe everyone has had enough of that from me.  But I would like to tell you a little bit about one of my recent out-of-state trips because, even though I kind of got yanked along on it at the last minute (or felt a bit like I had), it turned out to be filled with quite a lot of lovely serendipity.  I don’t write very often about my trips.  I don’t take that many (usually), certainly not enough for this to be even sort of like a travel blog.  And I don’t usually read travel blogs, either, so I’m unlikely to do the genre much justice.  Even still.

This serendipity trip was to visit some relatives (in company with some other relatives) in League City and Galveston, Texas, which are both a bit south of Houston.  It had been well over a decade since I’d been there last, and when I was a kid and we’d used to visit, we’d always done so in the dead of summer, when the heat and humidity combine to make stepping outside rather a dicey proposition.  So this was going to be a new treat to visit in the spring.  (And oh my goodness it so was.  The weather cooperated so well that it wasn’t even humid until the very last day we were there!  It was Lovely.)

The trip did not start out a treat, though.  As soon as I got in to the Houston Airport, I got a call from my traveling companions (coming from elsewhere) that their flight had been delayed…by 10 hours.  These were also the traveling companions who had booked the rental car, and even if they hadn’t been, the Airbnb we’d commissioned wasn’t going to be available for at least 4 hours.  I didn’t even have the option of hanging around an airport restaurant for those 4 hours, because I do not like to drag my luggage through airports, which meant I had to leave security to get my bag, and hanging out in baggage claim for 4 hours is just no.  Queue impending apocalypse.

Luckily, the voice of my husband spoke up in my head around then to tell me to stop whining and make a plan because I have a freaking phone for freaks sake!  (You all, of course, were already thinking that, but you must understand that while I do indeed possess a smart phone, the only reason it’s not still a flip phone is so that texting is a little easier.  I am not technologically adept (which, of course, is hilarious considering that I make my living as a programmer, and yet, it remains true).)  Also, the part of me that is a mom spoke up and said that I should eat something before panicking.  So, I ate something (cleverly fetched before leaving airport security), and then employed the Google Maps, which instructed me that I should next explore the Houston Botanical Gardens!

The timing of this new plan was very good.  As I was preparing to venture forth from baggage claim, the building fire alarm went off.

And so I went in search of a cab (the one thing very easy to find near any baggage claim).  The cabby was baffled that I wanted to go from the airport to a botanic gardens, and further had never heard of this botanic gardens himself, and so we both had to do much poking at phone maps.  But then we were off!

It was not nearby.  But! it was in the direction of League City, where I eventually wanted to end up, so it was mileage properly spent.

And then when I got there, the people at the Botanic Gardens were very nice to me—because of course I’d arrived with my luggage.  I did call ahead to see if this would be a viable plan (otherwise I probably would have been imagining nightmare luggage-rejection scenarios all the way there), but still, how many people are usually willing to chuck your suitcase in their office for however long you’re going to hang around?  They put it in their storeroom at the giftshop, and I got to explore a Garden rather than being apocalyptically trapped at baggage claim.  (They also sold me a refreshing lime popsicle along with some other lovely bits and bobs—can’t pass up a gift shop!)

I did manage to explore first in the wrong direction (one direction has fields and a river before you get to another garden, and it was sunny and the gift shop had been out of sunscreen, alas).  But that meant I got to see the prettiest bits in their main gardens last.  I really liked their bamboo grove.  And I really liked their arid garden because, yes, even though I was coming from an arid state, I still don’t usually get to see giant agave with 15 ft tall flower stalks!  Some plants are just cooler than others, and those were they.

And thus, I had an unexpected, but serendipitously lovely, start to my trip.  But that wasn’t all.

Uber (which my husband had installed for me some months before) meant I was able to make it to the Airbnb.  The Airbnb had very high cupboards (notable because I was the tallest of us staying there, and I needed to stand on a chair to get most of the cups down) but no food except for the pretend, decorative kind (and a stick of butter…).  But, their handy welcome book had a handy recommendation for a bistro just 0.5 miles away, a totally walkable distance (at least when I was there, when the weather was being so gorgeously cooperative and not hot or humid?!).

And so I called my dad (so someone would know where the heck I was), and walked through a lovely shady neighborhood with a number of gorgeous and enormous (and, apparently, registered) Majestic Live Oaks, to the Main Street Bistro of League City, TX.

And the food they served me there was astoundingly delicious (really! so very tasty!).  I completely fell in love with their greenbeans, but everything was excellent, and I got my desert (lemon-blueberry bread pudding, also delicious) to-go, otherwise risk not having room for it.  And then I went to a nearby open-air Art Fair.

I had passed it on my walk there and so of course couldn’t resist exploring it on my way back.  They had all sorts of pretty things that I had to steal myself not to look at too closely in consideration of my travel budget.  And then of course a few pretty things (and jars of jam) that I wasn’t successful at stealing myself from.  And so, I walked back to the rental, through the beautiful, quiet, shady neighborhood, with treasure both tasty and shiny.

It was an astoundingly lovely first day, and not apocalyptic at all.  (Also particularly surprising because traveling by myself usually makes me too nervous to enjoy myself, and I was decidedly by myself all day.)

The rest of the trip was closer to as-expected (though still very nice).  We visited with our relatives.  Went to the seawall beach in Galveston, and rode the rainforest ride at the Rainforest Café, and bought lots of pretty seashells at Murdoch’s.  Went back to the Main Street Bistro for another divine meal.  Explored the Bishop’s Palace back in Galveston again (and thank goodness for a beautiful touring house that was still open late on a Monday! Mondays are tricky).  And, of course, had fun talking back at the Google Driving lady who kept really wanting us (and, demonstrably, others) to take the exit for Tiki Island and, like, stay there forever, or something.

Our last day was Tuesday, and our flights left late enough we had time to hang around and do something else.  But Tuesdays (especially in the morning) seem to be nearly as tricky as Mondays.  Fortunately, serendipity stepped in again and directed us to League City’s Half Price Books where my grandmother had used to be a very happy and devoted patron.  And it was very lovely.  Rather like the Platonic Ideal of a really great used-book store.  (You are tired of me saying ‘lovely’ at this point, but this trip was seriously charmed.)  These days I get most of my books on the Kindle, so I decided to explore the non-Fiction section where the least Kindle-able books tend to reside—and then wanted to keep just about everything I picked up.  Really, I had to force myself to put down an encyclopedic tomb that must have weighed 10 lbs, but I really wanted it, and I did end up getting three other books.  (My poor sea shells were not happy companions to those books all crammed into my luggage together, but they did mostly survive the trip home.)

And that was the serendipitously lovely end to my serendipitously lovely trip (aside from the blueberry-waffles-for-dinner my lovely husband had waiting for me when I got home).

This spring has been so very hard, but at the same time, there have been some things about it that have been so very lovely.  It’s been hard to count my blessings in the moment.  But the moments have still been there, shining gently, blessing me.