Catch-Up Post No. 3: Enfield and Home via First Class and One World Sapphire!

The little barn cats in Enfield like to sleep curled up in the garden.  Smoke is gray and Soot is a sooty black.  The shoes on the right are out of sequence.  I went back and filled a blank page.  These were shoes in the NJTransit waiting room when we returned to Maplewood on Sunday evening.  So many great feet and shoes!  

On the left is a drawing that B made in the moving car; hence his shaky lines. Great clumpy grass and tree limbs!  On the right are two of the sand castles that we made at Storrs Pond Saturday. These two-- a pointy mound that no one could quite identify and a Great Sphinx-- were already made when we arrived.  They were right at the edge of the pond where the water washed onto the beach, and they were protected by walls of sand.  At first I was going to draw while everyone else built, but I quickly gave that up and became one of the builders.  Too much fun!

 The man on the left was one of the leaders of the sand sculpture project.  He told stories about the ancient monuments as he worked, and he moved around helping different people and projects.  On the right is a Roman Coliseum and below that is a Mayan Observatory, which was soon amended to smooth out the angles to be more authentic.

T and I wanted to build something, and I thought of an Etruscan tomb or tomba.  I sketched it on the top to explain how it needed to look;  then I drew it after we finished.   On the right is L's drawing of the haunted shed from the day before.  He really got the rugged, creepy quality of this little unfinished part of the house.

Sadly, we had to head home the next morning.  Here is a view of White River Junction done from the train station.  On the extreme right of the drawing is an old diner where we occasionally ate breakfast in the past.  Now it seems to be fading into the land beside the tracks behind some weedy trees.  We took the train to Penn Station, then NJT to Maplewood for a last dinner and chance to visit.

Our last day was spent in airports, beginning at 5:15 a.m.  We had a lot of time to get to know the airport as our flight was cancelled five minutes before it was scheduled to board, and we couldn't get a flight that left before 10:45.  We DID get bumped to first class however;  below is a picture of Maya enjoying the amenities of first class.

On the right of Maya is my view of the cockpit from our seat in row 1.
I noticed that every person within range was plugged into a digital thing except for the woman on the left above in drawing 2938.  

Once we got to Charlotte, we had another four hours to wait until we finally got on our flight to Asheville.  We had also been elevated for our final flight:  we were classified as One World Sapphire, which meant that we had little blue globes printed at the bottom of our boarding passes that entitled us to join the ranks of the elite, premium, platinum, One World Emeralds, and One World Sapphires and PRE board!  Our seats were at the very back of the plane opposite the port-a-potty, but we had the questionable advantage of scrambling into them first and got to start in on the crossword puzzle before anyone else.  Love the airlines and their mysterious reward system and well-honed euphemisms!  Pre- boarding maybe means "pre-running of the bulls boarding"? Another curiosity was the announcement, made over and over, that the airline had recently changed to a NEW system of boarding called ZONES.  Who really cares?  And how is it new when they've been boarding by zones for a long time now;  plus they always say "If you don't have a zone number on your boarding pass you may board at any time."