A Glass Half Full Day

Yesterday was a Glass Half Full Day. Actually, it was an overflowing day!

I left Grenada on Tuesday after a month on the island. The highlights:

• A couple days of recovery and orientation upon arrival.
• A week of ride-along watching a fabulous South African instructor teach and getting to know the Grenadian cruising grounds.
• A week of sail training and racing on the water with fellow instructors, all more experienced than me.
• A week of teaching two students on my own on a Lagoon 42' Catamaran.
• A few days of resting, air conditioning (not a luxury) and exploring the island.

It was a fabulous trip and I'll write more about the experience in a subsequent post.

Upon preparing to leave Grenada, it started to dawn on me that the upcoming plans I had made for traveling straight to La Paz/Baja were going to be grueling. I was not mistaken

On Tuesday afternoon I left Grenada and flew to Miami. I had to go through customs there, recheck my bag, and go through TSA again before boarding a flight to Charlotte. I wish I had logged the steps through the airport -- it had to have been 2-3 miles. I got into Charlotte at midnight managed a decent but short night of sleep in a hotel before heading back to the airport to catch a flight to Seattle at 9:30am.

Aside: I watched Enola Holmes from Grenada-Miami and Enola Holmes 2 from Miami-Charlotte. Great movies if you have seen them. A pleasant twist of history, empowerment, and romance for Sherlock Holmes based stories (or offshoot in this case) as well.

The Seattle-Charlotte flight was uneventful except that I was tired. I watched Where the Crawdads Sing, another great movie, and from what people tell me, the book was even better. I got into Seattle around noon, booked another hotel near the airport, napped, exercised, read, and journaled for the day. I had an early flight the next day and wanted to stay close to the airport.

I checked my bag at 6:00am for an 8:00am departure, figuring that would give me plenty of time to make it through security and hopefully get coffee and breakfast at the gate.

It was a nightmare. My TSA pre-check didn't come through on my boarding pass so I had to go through the normal line. This was the fourth time in 3 days I had gone through security and the whole scene gets more dehumanizing every time.

Rant: I think the amount of effort that goes into making our planes safe is great. I think the way we go about it is stupid and wasteful but that's another story. What gets me though, is why we don't put even a fraction of the effort into making our schools similarly safe.

By the time I get through security and walk to the departure gate, the plane is already boarding. I'm tired, hungry, and grumpy as I board the plane.

I'm in a glass half-full state.

I notice the woman in front of me is struggling to keep her backpack on her shoulder as she tries to feed her baby a bottle. I asked if there was anything I could to help her but she looked at me with a very cheery, genuine smile and said "No thank you." She had also just traveled from the east coast the previous day and stood in the same security line with me for 90 minutes with her infant. In addition, every time she goes through security TSA takes her pumped breast milk (a liquid) and scans it through a special machine to make sure it isn't an explosive. Can't make this shit up. We talked and laughed all the way down the ramp onto the plane.

My half-empty glass flipped to half-full.

But that was only the beginning. As the plane lands in Phoenix for a three hour layover, a couple of friends text me that they are in Mexico and wondering if I've made it to La Paz yet. These people were students of mine last summer and we became good friends and I was excited to hear from them as I'm scheduled to arrive in Mexico the very same day. I'm hoping we can get together at some point.

After a couple hours in Phoenix, I'm getting ready to board the plane on the final leg of the trek to La Paz. Another friend -- also a student of mine from last spring -- texts me that he and his family will be in Baja for a week kiteboarding and wondering what I was up to. We had talked about me wanting to learn to kiteboard and he had invited me to Hood River to do so. I told him I had a week before I was to start teaching and that I might join them. One thing leads to another by the time my plane takes off I have a place booked in La Ventana and am all set for kiteboarding lessons next week!

Glass is full now.

Upon arriving in Cabo the Go Baja Sailing School was supposed to pick me up at the airport but there was a misunderstanding. They were great though and put me up in a 4 star hotel near the airport and will pick me up today. I get on the shuttle to the hotel and start talking to woman that had spent 4 days traveling from Kenya via London. She was here for a leadership conference and so cheery. I got some exercise, pool swim, dinner, and collapsed.

Daily positive and gratitude affirmations are working. I went sent to sleep with my glass overflowing.