There and Back Again

The arrival back home in Norfolk about a quarter till five yesterday afternoon thus ended my first (but surely not the last) Thailand adventure. The flights went smoothly and unlike the outbout trip, my luggage actually arrived home when I did. So it was a good ending to a truly awesome vacation.

The route home took us from Dallas to Memphis then eastward into Virginia. From my window seat I noticed the pattern of mountains change from seemingly random to long ridges running in a north-south direction which I presumed (correctly as it turned out) to be the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Soon the mountains dropped away and our flight then followed a river coursing across the broad, flat plain. Given our location and the topography below, this had to be the James River. Ultimately the river passed though a familiar city: Richmond. From that point we turned southeast, still following the James River towards the coast and home.

On that final stretch I began to pick out familiar sights: Jamestown and nearby Williamsburg and a number of colonial-era plantations built right on the brown meandering river below. These were the travel destinations of my youth, those eagerly anticipated daytrips back when my world was much smaller than it is today. Somehow this was a fitting end to the journey to and from Southeast Asia and symbolic in many ways of how the limit of ones horizons evolve and expand over the course of a lifetime.