Tortoise Porn, and More

I started this post last fall and never got around to finishing it up. The mood for blogging, along with the sun, has returned after a long winter! There is much catching up to do, so I'll start here--our trip back to Iowa late last summer to visit friends and family:

After an absence of eight months our Iowa home base was calling strongly to me. Literally, in addition to my own urges to return, certain grandparents were requiring a visit SOON. In counting up the visits we needed to make it quickly became clear that Scott wouldn't be able to take enough time away from his PhD to come along for the whole trip, so, in late August, my mom flew out to DC and drove home with Pavlina and me, leaving boring old Scott to play in the lab all day and night.

We spent the first week catching up with my parents in Iowa City and Davenport and my mom's family near Lancaster, WI. Scott flew in to Dport and we headed to Waterloo to see his family. After a few days with them Scott and I swapped cars with my parents and set off for St. Louis in the Corolla, leaving Pavlina behind for the first time. It sounds corny, but the cliche "just like old times," fit perfectly. It was our fourth getaway weekend there so we hit all the favorites, most of which are restaurants, but so as not to paint us as pigs I only took pictures of non-eating activities:

The Jewel Box, an art deco greenhouse in Forest Park, built in the 1930's.

Between the two of us, with all our years of education, we couldn't figure out how to read a sundial.

A chimp with alopecia at The St. Louis Zoo. She gave me a major guilt trip by becoming shy and trying to hide the minute I tried to take her picture. She turned her back on us and hid her face so effectively that it was clear she was used to being singled out from the other chimps by zoo visitors. Clearly the zoo website is wrong when it claims: "Cinder is otherwise a normal, healthy chimpanzee and, unlike humans, is not faced with the psychological and social challenges the disease presents." The other chimps may accept her but we humans think it's just weird not to have hair.

A Malayan Sun Bear posing, so small and cute compared to the Zoo's other bears. Take the Spectacled Bears, for instance. On a previous trip to the Zoo Scott and I walked by their area and wondered what the one on the right was licking. Turned out to be it's penis. We left him to his, er, not-so-cuteness. After getting splashed by a vindictive penguin we passed back by the bears to find that the other had joined in the fun and both were slurping happily away. When a little boy and his dad ran up and the boy asked the inevitable "What are they doing, Dad?", we took our cue to leave.

This trip, we were treated to another example of the lustiness of the St. Louis Zoo's stock. Make sure the sound is on, as it makes the video oh-so-much better.

We spent our final morning at one of my favorite places ever: The Missouri Botanical Garden.

The lily pond is always a photogenic spot. This time it was especially so because we ran into Susan, my friend (best friend since the age of 10 when we found out we had the same birthday) Margaux's mom setting up to paint.

This picture shows what state I was in being at the Botanical Garden at the end of a four day date with Scott. I'm just one of those people who don't looked relaxed in pictures very often. Maybe that is because I don't relax very often. Something to think about...

Our last stop was one night in Peoria, IL with Scott's older brother and sister-in-law, Brian and Kirsten et al. With their younger set of twins just three months old, it surprised me that after seeing them Scott and I (alright, not Scott, just I) wondered if maybe we shouldn't consider the idea of having another child. I think this speaks of their great parenting style for I can't imagine myself being as gracious and relaxed a host as they were to us if I had four young children to care for. Above, Scott holds Andrew up (in a very dangerous position, since Andrew is a spitter) and Brian has Emily more safely in his lap.

A trip which requires one-way airline tickets for two different people, a straight-through-the-night-15-hour drive (with a baby, even a good car rider like Pav), with stops in four states, overnight stays in eight different locations, some of them more than once (but not in a row), can hardly be called a "vacation." Using such a trip as a relaxing break from the stress of a busy life in hectic DC can only be called "just plain giddy irresponsibility," to quote the stodgy father on Mary Poppins. I hope that when we are older, Scott and I will look back on this trips like this, and others like it we will take in the future, and smile. For what better way to make your stressful everyday life seem more relaxed than to take an exhausting "vacation"?