It’s been almost a week since I’ve gotten back to Dubai and as expected it was easy to get back into the “normal” routine of things. In some ways it doesn’t even seem like I’d left, certainly not for the two months that I was away. Thinking back this summer was the longest vacation that I’d taken. The other ones were closer to a month and a half, this one almost two months.
Worried about doing nothing, and even worse, getting comfortable doing nothing, I decided to start walking again… not that I ever stopped, but I wanted to ensure that I kept moving after the vacation. So my first walk was for about two hours and by the time I got back I was embarrassingly drenched in sweat. It was so bad, that my shirt looked like I’d been swimming with it on and my shorts looked like I had a bladder control problem. I decided to stay closer to home and would stay on the school’s track instead of on the streets. Why am I telling you all this? The simple reason is that it led up to me actually starting to run instead of walk. Admittedly I ran slowly, but I am running much to my own surprise. Over a kilometer at once which isn’t bad for a middle-aged, overweight smoker in ninety-degree heat, who hadn’t really ran for about thirty years. Oh, I ran a little bit here and there, usually just to see if I could run at all, then for a few years, about fifteen years ago, I ran on a treadmill.
The trip was good, I saw some things that I didn’t plan on seeing, and to my surprise I think that is what made this summer’s trip the best. The Leaning Tower of Pisa and Pompeii are the two that come to mind right now, but hanging out in the smaller cities of Greece was also a highlight. Now that I’m back I’ve got to start planning my next vacation. A little known fact to many of my friends is that the school pays for a roundtrip ticket to the US every year, this year I didn’t use it in the summer like I usually do, so I may use it to go to Australia for Christmas, or maybe even Argentina.
That’s all I got except to thank my Brother for reading the blog religiously while I traveled. As far as I know he was the only one, and it felt good to know that someone was out there so to speak. If you did read but didn’t let me know, thanks too.
