Travel Begins

Today was the beginning of two weeks of travel which will include a tour of NASA and the fourth Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat which takes place on a cruise ship. The trip began early this morning with transit via shuttle, plane, and car. Now we’ve settled into the Houston hotel where we’ll stay until we board the ship on Sunday. I will have significant hosting and conference work to do, but the spaces in between, I’ll get to write. I’ll get to unfold my creative brain and let it consider long slow thoughts instead of using it up on the logistics tasks required to run house, family, and business.

I’ve never been to Houston before. It feels like a cross between Florida, California, and the deep south. I haven’t been here long enough to think of it except in reference to pieces of other places that I have been. However one thing I do notice is the flatness of the horizon. I’ve lived for the last 25 years in a place where the landscape goes vertical only a few miles from my house. I’ve been to other states with flat horizons, but either I was surrounded by tall buildings, or other obstructions. Here I can see the tall buildings of downtown from fifty miles away. My brain keeps trying to parse the flat horizon as ocean. I guess that is the only flat horizon referent that my brain has stored.

Tonight is for unwinding and travel recovery. Tomorrow we have work to do.