Home from D.C.

This picture is all I have to show for the 90 minutes I spent site-seeing during my quick training trip to D.C. I trotted down to the national mall, took a short cut back through the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, listened to a jazz singer do one tune at a street fair and had a bratwurst with kraut from the Gorden Biersch booth there. Then off to the airport for a 56 minute flight home to Charlotte.

A word about coming home: If the flight attendant hadn't just announced that we'd touched down in Charlotte, I would never have known. Absolutely nothing looked familiar coming out of the gangway into the airport. I momentarily panicked, thinking I'd taken the wrong plane. All the way through the airport I searched for something familiar - a shop, a piece of art, a turn in the hallway - to jog my sense of place. I couldn't even picture what the baggage claim curb would look like or the parking lot where I'd left my car. It wasn't until the parking shuttle came out of the terminal and I spotted the downtown Charlotte skyline that I was certain I really was home.

In fairness, I've only actually flown into the Charlotte airport three times, so maybe that's why it's so foreign to me after all these months.

But it does make me wonder how "at home" I really am here - or how well I'm doing with this whole transition. I will say I've been intensely homesick for the dry Utah air, the Rocky Mountains and my family these last few weeks.

Getting off that plane today, the airport didn't seem right to me because it wasn't Salt Lake City. It wasn't home.