Even with larger biennial respites into alpine hinterlands, work sweltered from the end of 2022 through halftime 2024. I was looking forward to August to catch my breath and potentially meet up with an old friend in the French Alps. That specific sojourn ended up falling through, but in its place something remarkable happened: I did… nothing.
N.b. the following several posts will be wildly out of chronological sequence as I finally get to synopses of photos since 2019.
The 24 months after my repatriation into Charleston was tumultuous for two reasons. First, I wanted badly to scratch the hiking itch, which isn’t so accessible from a Charleston doorstep; and second, because COVID rendered travel impractical for months. Just prior to airline and border lockdowns, I was back in Germany on an equipment preacceptance. Two weeks later after I got back, international travel into the US stopped altogether. In late 2020, once domestic travel restarted awkwardly, I realized it was faster to fly to Denver than to drive to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and in June 2021 I found myself flying to Colorado again as the snows thawed.
It took a little more coordination than tools in the age of the internet might normally require, but two high school friends and I visited Colmar on a warm summer weekend in 2019. I knew of the city not for its architecture or cute village vibe but for being the main seat of Liebherr, a convenient (okay, forced… it’s been too many years since I meant to write this) bridge and allusion to the title of this post: over a dozen years ago, I had thought my career would likely wind up in construction equipment. While life change is relentless, it’s curiously circuitous to seemingly persistent themes.
I started writing this post in 2020, when I thought I would be writing approximately one year after rejoining the North American workforce. Before I left Germany, I had three blogs in my queue. Now, approaching four years later, my queue [from my expat assignment] still stands at three. Weathering upended social norms and my fading memory of my years as an expat, my photos — as much as ever — give me now two senses of nostalgia: one of general pre-pandemic life, and the second of what a younger me felt when traveling.
In the summer of 2019, I attended my fourteen-year “returniversary” to the Paris Air Show. The first time I went, I clicked away in exuberant glee toward the static display of the Boeing 777-200LR, consuming in two days practically all the film I brought with me on my eight-week study abroad program. This time, I’d tie up a 64 GB SD card, thought hardly any of it on Boeing metal with the 737MAX grounded.
On the second of my two trysts with New Zealand, one enclave in particular attracted my attention, despite the weather being uncooperative both days of my stay. This year, when I should be galavanting around Europe to take in all I can before I commit myself to the insane asylum of localizing a manufacturing line to Charleston, I admitted defeat to there being too many unvisited places in Europe and booked a flight to New Zealand instead. I landed scrutinizing a rain shower and double rainbows to the north, but Auckland airport — and my luggage — remained, incredibly, dry.
When I flew back from New Zealand, I came across an article about interesting hotels of the world. Most were the typical exotic types: posh rooms and lavish spas with four-digit price tags. The one that caught my eye didn’t include either feature, and its price also wasn’t sky-high. Apparently, a little more than a decade ago, a 747 came to its final resting place not in an airplane graveyard but rather as a hostel. I figured the chance of a consensual nap in the cockpit of a 747 was going to be rare if not impossible, so I took the bait and booked the trip. As London had been, it was supposed to have been a quick weekend: two nights sleeping in the plane, then back to Germany. The drive to Munich started off cloudy, and the Alps weren’t visible as I flew on to Zurich.
After having lived in the Allgäu for almost four years, one aspect of big city life I miss is access to the performing arts. I really enjoying playing trumpet for several years and there is something to be said about the emotional high of putting on a production. Even with regular trumpet practice over, I can still derive joy from a seat in an auditorium. Although there are local musical groups, witnessing the thundering ballads of Broadway is a dream in time gone by. Unless… we consider all of Europe a massive stage of its own.
If my first post about New Zealand gave the impression that the entire two weeks was colorless, I have some contrasting news: they were not. When I flew toward my layover airport of Singapore en route to Auckland, we floated among azure skies. Even if grey marshmallows occasionally interrupted my view once on the ground, the peacefulness of streaking above the clouds didn’t end with the bump of landing in New Zealand.
En me brossant les dents 