Welcome home!
After two weeks of mostly warm weather, we left San Antonio, Texas at 0720 and the temperature was 71degrees F. When we landed in Ottawa, Canada at 1430 the temperature was 3 degree F. Now that catches your attention!

I must mention here our travel by plane experience. With all the hullabaloo in the news about all the airline snafus, canceled flights, long waits, lost or delayed luggage and other dangerous or discourteous behavior, I have to say here that for the first ,in more years and trips than I can remember, everything on our scheduled itinerary was met exactly on time, both ways. It was so perfect, that I thought I was in a different plain, a different dimension.

Because our flight from Ottawa left at 0700 on Sunday morning, 18 November, we traveled up to Canada's capital city on Saturday afternoon and spent the night in a local no-tell-motel. Although @ $125.00 a night Canadian, it's harder to describe it as a seedy lfop-house where the room gets lent 6 times a night. Actually, this Days Inn is one we've stayed in before and is very accommodating, and it's only 5 minutes from the Park-N-Fly where we leave our car while we're away.. At the border, before crossing the river into Canada (we drove on a bridge--too cold to swim or kayak) we purchased a bottle of wine at the duty free store, so when we got settled in our room we ordered out for pizza and together with the vino, had a scrumptious Italian repast.

The next morning at 0530 I was greeted by a heavily frost covered windshield, as the temp. had migrated down to 28 degrees F. Can you guess what rel forgot to put in the car? Yup, no scraper. Actually, I did locate a small hand operated scraper which helped get us moving on down the road before the defrost was up to warm.

We arrive at Chicago, O'Hare a half hour early. We made the shuttle trip to our gate and had about a 45 minute wait before our flight to San Antonio was to leave. While I was sitting there reading Taylor Caldwell's "The Arm and The Darkness," D. was snapping scads od photos. I saw these two sailors and was reminded of 44 years ago when, wearing the same uniform rel his self was traversing this same airport on his way home from US Navy Hospital Corpsman School for Christmas holiday before proceeding to his first duty assignment at Naval Air Station Patuxent River , Maryland. Just a little nostalgic moment there folks. D. went over and asked the sailors if she could take there photo, and, as you can see, they were very willing. If you look in the upper left hand corner of the pic, you'll espy rel in the light colored ball cap reading his book (really, research for my novel, which sadly I did not finish in the NaNoWriMo time frame.)

D. went berserk photographing the upper side of earth's cloud cover on the three hour trip to San Antonio............
If we had known ahead of time, we'd have brought along our water skis and we could have cloud-skied all the way to Texas! ;)

The San Antonio temp. at noon when we arrive was in the eighties....Yippee-ki-a-ki-oh!!

We rented a Saturn 7 seater with GPS and made a bee-line south for Corpus Christi and family.........