Travel While You Can

Cherry blossoms 
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2022

Travel will soon become a thing of the past. Not only are the globalists getting ready to shut down commercial airports, destroying all the industries dependent on travel, but air transportation will no longer be available to the masses, it will only be allowed to those who have billions, who can afford their own jets, and have enough money for landing fees at the few remaining commercial and private airports.

Besides the interdiction of a large contingent of combustion engine cars in EU cities by 2050, air conditioning, gas stoves, gas heating systems, wood-fired ovens, and other amenities that make modern life more comfortable and livable will disappear in the U.S. By 2050 only electric vehicles will be allowed on EU roads. No Fossil Fuels-Powered Cars in Europe Cities by 2050 - autoevolution

In the new digital currency world being implemented rapidly around the globe, travel will be a privilege that only the mega rich will be able to afford. The masses are encouraged to join the virtual reality realm if they want to see the real world.

The New York Times is already mentally preparing/indoctrinating the masses with bizarre arguments against travel. The statement that many people make, “I love to travel,” is thus classified by the author, Agnes Callard, as “the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make.” I wonder how she would feel if only allowed to move on foot within her 15-minute city, in a very limited radius her entire life.

To support her view, the author uses examples from famous people like G. K. Chesterton who wrote that “travel narrows the mind,” Ralph Waldo Emerson who called travel “a fool’s paradise,” Socrates and Immanuel Kant who seldom left their homes, and the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa who penned in his “Book of Disquiet” the following, “I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places…. The idea of traveling nauseates me … Ah, let those who don’t exist travel!... Travel is for those who cannot feel…. Only extreme poverty of the imagination justified having to move around to feel.”

In this new and twisted view, if you love to travel, you are a fool, you cannot feel, and you are lacking imagination. Who knew that exploration of new lands, horizons, landmarks, and other historical and archeological sites suddenly became passe because the globalists gave the orders to the mainstream media to indoctrinate the masses that travel is bad, and you are shallow and lacking if you do.

Callard wrote that “tourism is what we call traveling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them.” The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker

I’ve never treated my travels as shallow. I walked in the steps of history with much anticipation and pride and reached places I’ve only dreamed of. I’ve learned more things from my travels domestically and internationally than I had ever learned in all the years I spent in public schools and in college classrooms. And I was paying close attention to the professorial lectures since I was paying the tuition.

The New York Times is also suggesting that we should take pilgrimage-style vacations where we travel on foot. What a healthy idea if you can walk all day. But so many people are unable to do so. Health reasons, handicaps, and other issues prevent them from traveling on foot, but they would still love to have the experience of nature, learn from archeological digs, see paintings, sculptures, beautiful buildings, experience cuisines abroad for themselves. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/travel/long-walk-exercise.html

Globalists are suggesting replacing travel with virtual reality, a fake experience that does not begin to fill the thrill one experiences in front of a masterpiece or a statue at the Louvre or the awe of seeing the pyramids of Egypt and the Sphinx.

Billionaires, bureaucrats at the U.N., and mouthpieces writing for leftist magazines do not have the right to take away our freedom to experience history, archeology, nature, other countries, monuments, mountains, lakes, churches, famous statues in person. They are trying to control 8 billion people under the bogus premise that humanity is in peril. They must control everything we do in our daily lives to save us from ourselves because they know better, they are the gods of sustainability, the cornerstone of United Nations Agenda 2030, saving the planet from imaginary carbon emission Armageddon while the billionaires and their sycophant bureaucrats are jetting around the world in their private planes, mega yachts, and other fossil fuel driven machines that emit tons of carbon.

 

 

No Gas Stoves, No Cars, No Electric Cars, and No Flying

People in many U.S. states keep voting more and more communists into office, on a wave of anti-American sentiment and hatred of the white race, replacing Americans who love our country and want what is best for their families. Illegals are the new face of America. Leftists want open borders and a globalist government that will control everything and everybody, with the help of the corporatist technocracy and the police state.

The new politicians come from the left and from third world nations that do not care at all about the fabric of American society, about our history, our language, and do not wish to assimilate. They just want better lives now, as soon as they cross the southern border.

The replacement “Americans” leave their pathetic countries in order to come illegally to the U.S. for generous welfare. All they have to do is vote Democrat and move into conservative states. Who can blame them? Life is short, why be poor in your own country when you can be richer in America on the dole paid by hard-working Americans’ taxes’?

These new and instant Americans hail from failed socialist countries and other totalitarian regimes and do not understand that their ignorant and illegal voting is fundamentally transforming our country into the tyranny they left behind. They help the one-party state, the Democrats, to fundamentally alter our way of life.

What are some of the fundamental changes we are forced to make? The one-party state is forcing us to give up fossil fuels, our cars, our electricity consumption, our meat consumption, travel, flying, most amenities that make our lives easier and worth living, and even our gas stoves.

I already experienced totalitarian control under communism and I ran away to America. But America is no longer the shiny city on the hill, and there is nowhere else left to escape to.

The communists of yesteryear did not have such technological control like we have today in America; the communist one-party state had an army of spies, policemen, secret police, economic police, neighborhood and block informers, and the military. There was nothing we could do but obey. Armed dissenters who tried to live alone in the mountains were hunted down, imprisoned, or killed.

Citizens had to ask permission to move, change jobs, go on vacations separately from their spouses, and only children of communist party leaders had a place in the free day care, kindergarten, and in greatly sought after free universities.

We had to carry I.D.s at all times, to obey curfew, to have our homes were searched on demand, without a warrant, checking for extra food, hidden cash, and for extra possessions. They tapped our phones, opened our correspondence, and packages. There was not much anybody could do without them knowing it.

We were deprived of heat, water, electricity, food, medicines, and most basics. People in the cities were cold in winter and hot in the summer. Villagers had to buy wood or cut it illegally in order to stay warm in winter time. They cooked with gas stoves fed by bottles of propane.

Gas stoves helped us cook meals, heat cold water for washing and laundry, and the gas oven kept us warm in the tiny kitchen in wintertime. The steam from the radiators never made it hot enough to the fifth floor to keep us warm.

I remember when gas used to be called in the U.S. the “clean burning alternative.” You could retrofit cars and trucks with gas in the 1980s when oil became too pricey and scarce. Now the globalists are after gas usage as well and New York has become the first state to impose a ban on gas stoves, furnaces, and propane heating in new construction.

Dr. Lawrence R. Huntoon, a New Yorker, wrote, “It gets brutally cold in the winters here, and massive snowstorms often knock out the electric power, frequently for days. Some people have natural gas generators to keep from freezing to death. Without electricity, thermostats don't function. The electric grid is fragile. Under the substantial increase in load caused by this woke policy, rolling blackouts would become the norm.”

But the globalists are not stopping at gas stoves and furnaces. According to Technocracy Now, globalists want, via the World Economic Forum (WEF), a 75 percent reduction (by 2050) in the private ownership of cars, including electric vehicles.  WEF claims that most of the world’s population will be urban by 2050 and the public won’t need a private car or the use of commercial air travel. The general population will be locked up in the 15-minute cities.

Politicians and unelected policymakers are making the middle-class poor and people will die from their policies. When you keep voting for the communist Democrats who are destroying our country, while you are living a comfortable life now under a capitalist economy, but you wish to transform it into a communist-controlled society, I wonder how sound is your judgment.

 

 

Rules for Woke Radical Activists

The Ship of Fools 
Medieval drawing

In case you wonder if the leftists have a modern version of Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals for the Woke Marxist army of activists that are trained currently in the U.S., wonder no more – it is called Beautiful Trouble. As always, the Woke leftists use disinformation to describe their nefarious anti-American activities by using a website with an innocuous sounding title, Beautiful Trouble. Trouble is never beautiful, it is ugly and violent, but for the occasional surfer, the pairing of beautiful with trouble definitely “triggers” one’s curiosity because the two do not belong together at all. https://beautifultrouble.org/

As Lynda Fairman so aptly said, “Anytime there is a specific adjective in front of the word ‘justice,’ it means the opposite of equal, blind justice becomes the discrimination against one group/person for revenge of something to benefit another group/person. We must start taking back the language whenever we hear its misuse and call it what it is:  Disinformation.”

The Beautiful Trouble website introduces the woke activist to “creative tools for a more just world” via a Tool Box (presented in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian) with “ideas and best practices that puts the power in your hands.” There are sections on Stories, Tactics, Theories, Principles, Methodologies, and Action Trainer Modules.

This “just world” is the evil world of Marxist ideology, an ideology radicals embrace with enthusiasm. Past history and lessons learned from the destruction and death the Marxist ideology caused are irrelevant in their indoctrinated minds.

The approximately fifty-one suggested tactics of waging war on the American people include:

-          advanced leafleting (wear strange costumes, hand out ice cream, climb on someone’s shoulders)

-          app flooding (take over a politically neutral phone application to the Marxist cause and overwhelm it with campaign messages)

-          artistic vigil (it might include gluing oneself to priceless works of art in a museum)

-          autonomous servers (organized collectives using networked computers to send information to the Woke community)

-          hanging banners (such as the Resist one unfurled over the White House shortly after the inauguration of President Trump)

-          blockades (chain-linked activists across major highways and interstates, entrances to public buildings, building occupation, and encampment in a public place,

-          noise-making protests (screaming, blowing whistles, banging drums, pots and pans, honking horns, setting off smart phone ringtones)

-          citizen arrest (arresting a policeman)

-          civil disobedience (breaking the law in public, while the police is watching because the mayor made a compact with the woke disruptors to not intervene)

-          clandestine leafleting (“anything you can get away with”)

-          consumer boycott (“economically pressure your target”)

-          creative disruption (maladjusted activists disrupting a legitimate event they disagree with by making noise, singing, throwing things such as glitter, eggs, theatrics, and histrionics)

-          creative petition delivery (swaying ignorant public opinion by using art, theater, and misplaced humor to deliver a message or petition)

-          cultural disobedience (deliberate violation of what activists call “unjust laws” and subverting cultural norms they disagree with)

-          culture jamming (“a cultural intervention that alters a brand to make a subversive political point”)

-          currency hacking (defacing paper currency, which is a crime, by writing political messages on paper money)

-          debt strike (refusing to make debt payments and forcing the banks to accept lower payments, thus passing the debt onto innocent Americans)

-          distributed action (mass protest with coordinated actions such as banging pots, turning lights off, and wearing the same color of clothing)

-          distributed denial of service (coordinated online attack of a vast number of ignorant lefties who flood a targeted website with high levels of data traffic thus shutting it down)

-          divestment (withdrawing personal investment in a company, putting pressure on an industry that lefties disagree with)

-          electoral gorilla theater (running for public office as a prank, sabotaging a policy the left dislikes)

-          encryption (helping communication between the radical activists)

-          eviction blockade (mob protest against an eviction they see as unjust)

-          flash mob

-          flotilla (mob with kayaks blockade traffic)

-          general strike (workplace shut down)

-          guerilla projection (using high-powered projector to shine a spotlight on what the mob sees as injustice)

-          hashtag campaign (leftist use of Twitter)

-          hashtag hijack (steal someone else’s hashtag)

-          hoax (impersonating and stealing a target’s identity to release a fake media event, made up to support the leftist mob’s point of view)

-          human banner (human aerial “art” to protest something or someone the left does not like)

-          hunger strike

-          identity correction (“an act of activist ventriloquism in which you momentarily assume the mask of power to speak a little LIE that tells a greater truth”)

-          image theater (activists form statues that represent in their view an oppression and to them, everything is an oppression if it disagrees with their warped ideology)

-          infiltration (activists form mobs not just at the homes of people they target but also in their official meetings)

-          inflatables (use inflated props with helium to communicate the leftist view)

-          invisible theater (public staging of a scene that highlights some form of imagined discrimination)

-          jail solidarity (create RESISTANCE by putting pressure on authorities to release jailed radical activists)

-          legislative theater (a theater of the imagined “oppressed” in a government setting)

-          lamentation (fake-mourning publicly a criminal who deliberately disobeyed the law and suffered the consequences)

-          light brigade (illuminating night-time specific locations to advance radical agendas)

-          mass street action (huge public protest against a cause that disagrees with the radical agenda)

-          media-jacking (hijack the opponent’s media event)

-          music video (social justice music videos to manage the radicals to action)

-          occupation (physically occupying public spaces to disrupt society, i.e., sit-ins, factory occupations, housing squats, public squares, public land)

-          non-violent search and seizure (“citizens search warrant” to steal documents)

-          phone banking (mobilize radicals to call or text the government)

-          phone blockade (tie up the service of the target, by using large numbers of radicals to repeatedly dial the key phone lines of the target)

-          public filibuster (confrontational interruption of a public hearing or government vote by standing and speaking non-stop)

-          reverse graffiti (spell the radical message by cleaning up filth on walls or sidewalks)

-          spoof website (making almost identical website of the targeted organization but using fake information and initiatives)

-          storytelling (“organizing reality and political power” by making-up social problems as the radicals see it)

-          subversive travel (“defy and subvert travel restrictions” to challenge borders and any population movement across the globe; one example would be aiding and abetting the illegal crossing of our southern border by millions of unvetted people from around the globe, defying our immigration laws)

-          trek (journey by bike, bus, boat, or on foot, to a specific place to rally geographically dispersed people to a radical cause)

To defeat the leftist radicals, the Woke communists of several American generation brainwashed in schools, we must learn from their manual. The mantra of radical activism is “the real action is your target’s reaction,” how we respond to their destructive communist Wokeism. So far, our response has lacked a well-organized and consistent plan to protect our families, values, and culture.

Highly organized mob aggression, chaos, and the violent destruction of reality have ruled our lives and the streets for more than seven years now. Democrat local and state governments have stepped in to help the radical mobs. We witnessed the destruction, the burning, the looting, and the sad fraying of the fabric of our society.

The “direct action’ that radicals advocate is not new, it is a Marxist term from the Soviet era. “Design your action to provoke the reaction you want and then incorporate it into your action. If it does not work the first time, adjust, and try again.” https://beautifultrouble.org/

Radical leftists never give up and neither should America-loving citizens.

NOTE: The spelling of the word ‘theater’ throughout the website was ‘theatre,’ indicating that the website was developed and written by British-speaking persons.

Re-Enactment of the Largest Cavalry Battle at Brandy Station, Virginia

On a sunny June 10, 2023, we drove through six counties in Virginia to reach Brandy Station, in the middle of vast fields located in Culpeper County, Virginia, to witness the re-enactment of the largest cavalry battle in the history of America. This year marks 160 years since the Battle of Brandy Station took place in the Civil War that tore this nation apart.

I was pondering having to cross six counties to drive about 50 miles; the political mapping of Virginia is very strange, no doubt redistricted constantly to benefit those in perennial and absolute power.

So many men and young boys on both sides of the conflict had lost their lives or were maimed for the wishes of a few who never set foot in battles far away, stretching across fields, woods, farms, homes, churches, and swamps.

Fields of hay and wooded areas were the theater of this battle that soaked the ground with the blood of innocent men, soldiers convinced and paid rather poorly to fight a war in the interest of the wealthy who owned slaves and whose economic interests depended on maintaining the status quo.

The other side believed in freeing the Africans enslaved on the Democrat-owned plantations that maintained their wealth. It appears simple, but history is never simple, the complex twists and turns must be studied carefully by each generation to bring the ugly truth to light. Hiding or erasing the inconvenient truth does more injustice to historical accuracy when new generations ignore reality and repeat the painful history.

The Battle of Brandy Station was the largest cavalry battle fought in North America and the first battle of the Gettysburg campaign. According to historians, from the total number of soldiers involved (20,000), 17,000 belonged to the “mounted branch.” At the end of the battle on June 9, 1863, neither side won, and casualties numbered 866 for the Union and 575 for the Confederates. However, the Confederate cavalry’s overwhelming superiority was gone.

According to the museum archives, “The Civil War brought fundamental changes to the United States. It brought economic prosperity to the North and ruin to the South. With millions of men at war, women took on new roles and forever changed the social fabric of the country.”

Riots occurred in the South due to wartime food shortages – in 1863 hundreds of women attacked stores in Richmond. They demanded “bread or blood.” New York City had its own riots against the army draft.

Women’s organizations sent food and clothing to the Union army, one such being the Soldiers Aid Society of Springfield, Illinois. Women from the South were in the fields everywhere, ad hoc nurses if you will, helping the sick, the wounded, loading grain, driving the “reapers,” etc.

The surgeon is in the tent

Wherever the armies campaigned and camped, the locals became refugees.  With no government help or safety net, many families lost all property and personal effects, becoming destitute.

Northerners organized “sanitary fairs” to raise tens of millions of dollars to help the Union Army. Southern women had their own fund raisers to help Confederate soldiers but on a much smaller scale. The Civil War created a “national interest in philanthropy.”

At the time, Brandy Station was located on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, now James Madison Highway, a key supplier to the Army of the Potomac and a passenger depot. Today a blue sign reminds us of where Brandy Station used to be during the Army of the Potomac’s 1863-1864 winter campaign on the slopes of Gregg’s Approach, the Fleetwood Hill, and St. James Church. Today the area is nothing but large fields of hay with wooded areas interspersed.

Brandy Station was the railroad stop where the supplies and people were loaded and unloaded, where soldiers could have had their pictures taken for $1.50, bought tobacco and canned peaches/fruit, the most frequently purchased, and other desired items. Soldiers wrote that they could buy “oysters, fresh fish,” and other items which “tempt the pocketbook of the soldier . . .” Another soldier wrote, “It was a very busy place from morning till night loads of army wagons were coming and going . . . waiting for their time to load.”

The Civil War killed so many fighters on both sides. For every soldier who died in battle, two soldiers died of disease. Dr. Alfred J. Bollet wrote that “more than half the men of a regiment were incapacitated by sickness. . .” because the huge camps were breeding grounds for disease.

Tens of thousands of farm boys living in close quarters, twelve to a tent, sleeping like sardines, were exposed to childhood diseases, not to mention lack of sewage disposal, infrequent bathing, and poor nutrition. The hard tack was hard as a rock and often filled with worms. Those who survived were really specimens of the survival of the fittest category.

Soldiers cooked their rations together in “messes,” facing “death by the frying pan.” To supplement the salted beef, beans, and hard tack, the soldiers foraged in the neighborhood. The museum archives remarked that “the Civil War introduced armies to coffee.”

General Robert E. Lee wrote in 1862, “The recruits that have joined us . . . are afflicted with measles, camp fever, etc. . . . so that instead of being an advantage to us, they are an element of weakness, a burden.” Camp fever was epidemic typhus caused by body louse.

The weather was harsh in winter and extremely hot in summer, especially dressed in the wool uniforms, chosen for their durability. The linen was scratchy, got wet rather quickly, and stayed wet under the wool.

The soldiers’ diet of bread, dried beef and beans was served and eaten in unsanitary conditions. Soldiers often rejected the dried vegetables offered that could have provided them with needed vitamins.

One of the reasons that there were so many amputees at the end of the Civil War was the invention of a new bullet, the French Minie ball. Three out of four surgeries performed were amputations. At the end of the Civil War, almost half a million soldiers were disabled. As a result, in February 1865, orthopedic hospitals were established in the South.

In the State of Mississippi, one-third of the soldiers were killed or crippled in battle. In 1866 one-fifth of the state’s revenue was spent on artificial limbs for amputees. The government paid part of the cost to have soldiers fitted with artificial limbs, hands, arms, legs, and cosmetic appliances.

Surgeons had to improvise to save lives on the battlefield - one such example came from Dr. Samuel Cabot (1815-1885) who learned from his teacher in Paris, Dr. Geurin, how to perform a tracheotomy on a soldier who had been shot in the neck; Cabot used a tracheotomy tube fashioned from wire removed from a champagne bottle. The wounded soldier was able to breathe again and lived.

The invention of a new bullet caused 94 percent of the Civil War injuries. It was not the ignorance of the doctors that caused so many Civil War amputations, soldiers were gravely wounded by the new bullet invented in 1847 by the French ordinance officer named Claude-Étienne Minié. The soldiers called his bullet the “Minie ball.” The muzzle-loading rifled muskets were used in the Crimean War and in the American Civil War.

During the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, soldiers used smooth bored muskets which fired a round ball of lead that broke the skin and fractured any bone it hit. Before the Civil War, a new musket was invented with a rifled barrel with spiral groves cut inside which gave the bullet full velocity and more accuracy. This bullet was cone-shaped and had a hallow grooved base. Minie balls were still slow enough to remain inside the body. Upon hitting bone, the top of the cone flattened out and splintered bones, causing massive damage around the bone.

According to museum archives, “seven out of ten injured soldiers were wounded in the arm or leg; two out of ten in the body; and one out of ten in the head or neck.” The surgeons were not “butchers” or “sawbones” as they were called by the wounded soldiers, they chose amputations to save lives because the Minie balls’ damage caused a dramatic increase in infections and sepsis.

The Graffiti House, built in 1858 on property owned by James Barbour, faced the Orange and Alexandria Railroad tracks, and was used during the Civil War as a hospital by the Confederacy, and by both the Union and Confederacy for “undetermined administrative purposes.” It also served as Major General Prince’s division headquarters during the Union Winter Encampment of 1863-1864.

Confederate and Union soldiers drew pictures and autographed the plaster walls in charcoal. Covered with layers of paint and wallpaper, the drawings were covered and discovered in 1993 when the owner renovated the building.

Preserving history is very important. If we don’t know where we came from, we no longer know who we are, and we become a nation without a compass, adrift and drowning in a sea of corruption, immorality, lawlessness, and injustice.

 

Graffiti House

                                                                                                                       

Breathtaking Trip to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada

The 121- mile road from Calgary, Canada, to Banff National Park was on the smooth Trans-Canada Highway with almost no cracks for miles and miles. Well-kept wire fences on both sides of the highway prevented wild animals from crossing the highway and becoming roadkill. Well-built bridge crossing for the animals appeared from time to time, carefully landscaped and also connected to a continuous fence even going up to each bridge. A small fir-tree decorated the left side of the bypass entrance under each crossing bridge.

The Bow River meandered occasionally along the way, its crystal blue waters contrasting with the intense green and tall fir trees on its banks. Rapid currents would have made for a wild ride in a canoe.

Banff National Park was established in 1887 and covers an area of 2,564 square miles of meadows, lakes, the Bow River, glaciers, and peaks with popular ski slopes and even a gondola with an expensive ride (89 Canadian dollars) to the top to experience the view of the breathtaking Lake Louise. The park is located on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and abuts the border with British Columbia. 

Our lucky and serendipitous visit to Canmore and Banff was occasioned by our trip to Calgary to cheer our very talented grandson play hockey in the junior category. On this glorious Sunday, there were no games scheduled for his team which lost to the better trained Canadians who lived and breathed hockey every year. After all, it is their national sport, and the government provides excellent subsidies for teams to learn, practice, play, and to excel. That is not the case for American players who must pay their own way and their coaches. As I learned early on, hockey is a very expensive sport.

To say that our trip was breathtaking, literally and figuratively, is an understatement. We were not prepared for the other-worldly beauty of the 11,700 ft glacier and the frigid lake, Lake Louise, that it feeds with ice-cold seafoam blue water. The altitude tended to take our breath away, especially trying to keep up with energetic children who can walk really fast, while adults like us huffed and puffed.

The 8-minute shuttle ride to Lake Louise was more expensive than I had expected but much less than the gondola ride. The views were spectacular in every direction we looked. The photographs appeared surreal, as if we had used fake backgrounds, that is how amazing the landscape was. 

I was secretly hoping that my husband would not get his wish to see a live bear in its habitat and my prayer was answered. I am not sure what we would have done if we encountered such a magnificent and dangerous creature. Ever so jocular, hubby said, all he had to do was run faster than I did. I was elated that the closest he ever came to a grizzly bear was the stuffed one at the visitor's center.

Lake Louise is fed from the glacier above. The water was a translucent teal blue in color, made so by the powdery deposits resulting from the constant rubbing of the glacier against the surrounding rocks. 

Photos: Ileana Johnson June 2023

Return from Denver

We have returned from our trip to Canada and flew from Denver on a Boeing 777 with 360 passengers on board plus the crew. I've never flown before on such a large plane for just a three-hour flight.

There were several babies and toddlers on the plane, but none made a peep the entire time. I was pleasantly surprised. 

I did not think that Boeings could be any more uncomfortable, but I was wrong. This model's seats were tiny and felt like we were sitting in a plastic torture device from the lack of lumbar support and no padding whatsoever on the hard chairs. I was seated across the middle aisle from my hubby, but his seat was several inches behind mine. Strange!

The only Goth on the plane sat next to me. He was sporting strangely designed black clothes, tattoos, chains, a Mexican-looking black hat which was contrasting starkly with his Casper the ghost skin tone, and a long jet-black beard braided into a pig-tail style. He was carrying two huge backpacks and a very expensive Apple computer. Luckily, he did not smell bad, but I had to put up with his widely spread chicken legs because he decided to park his bulging backpack and his laptop case between his legs instead of putting them in the overhead compartment.

On the previous flight from Denver to Calgary, Canada, a grown man pooped on himself when the plane took off. He was seated next to my grandson. The smell was unbearable! Luckily, we were moved a row or two away from him, but the smell permeated the cabin. I felt bad for the poor guy until I saw him picking up his baggage from the carousel, laughing and carrying on with his two friends. Obviously, the incident did not faze him at all. What a memorably unpleasant flight that was!

Hubby sat near a father with his two children and wife, and they all wore black N95 masks. The most bizarre was the fact that they all ate sandwiches with their masks on, took one bite each time, and then put the masks back on and chewed their food. They repeated this action until they finished their meals. It was so painful to watch, especially the small children. It looked like child abuse to me.

We arrived at Dulles at 2 p.m. after a bumpy flight due to severe weather but a smooth landing. I watched the assorted libs waiting to pick up their suitcases - some wearing their sandals with white or colorful socks, some showing their derrieres, breasts, and multiple tats, and some with strange colored hair. What an entertaining show!

We took the bus to the economy parking and, even though we knew exactly which row we had parked on, we had a hard time finding our SUV because in a well-lighted parking lot, at 2:30 a.m., all cars and SUV look about the same. Fifteen minutes later, we were on our way home.

What a joy to finally come home after eight days of a whirlwind trip to Canada to watch our 9-year-old grandson play competitive hockey. He is so good and ambitious! We love him and his little brother who was a joy the entire time. Being a grandparent is the best!