Russ&Suzie

Trip Log
2012-02-28 20:47:07 (UTC)

Home from 30 hr trip; snow in Wisconsin; Holly's passion

Two people wrote to tell about the beautiful snowfall of 2/24! Not quite so beautiful after our long trip and three days later, but hey, it's home and we're safe.

But what a cold house! Though warm blankets helped allow us seven hours of sleep at a usual Wisconsin time. Occasional feelings of weirdness so far but as good a transition as one could wish for. I've left the fasting schedule for the transition days but found this morning the welcome news of having lost five pounds over the trip! I'd thought the opposite and will see what the Fitness Center scales show, but grateful for the seeming restraint on eating (or maybe the better quality of food that I ate in Asia).

Susie calculates the trip took 30 hours starting from where we started in Hanoi's Melia Hotel. This includes airport waiting and flight-legs that included Hanoi to HOng Kong (economy), then Hong Kong to Los Angeles (the long one! for which we gratefully had Business Class and our little individual cubicles in which we could stretch out completely as well as watch our own little television/ movie programs or how the trip was progressing!), LA to Chicago (first class on American Airlines that does indeed seem degraded with its bankruptcy), and finally the last leg to Madison to be met by Dickie who took Susy Doane home followed by us so that we began our sleep at midnight.

Had some engaging books that helped with the 30-hours. Completed the History of Thailand, read most of Randall Jarrell, poet and critic in his six lectures on W.H. Auden, and finally, picked in Chicago, Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, a short enchanting book written in 1979 published by the NY Review of Books. Also on the long Pacific leg of the flight, I enjoyed Swan Lake as performed by the Australian Ballet in the Opera House of Sydney. So elegant. I wish to see some ballet maybe in NY and as Susie points out, here in Madison.

Holly Young from Hawaii on the big island (on the trip with her mom, Sue Young from Cape Cod) spoke passionately at the farewell dinner in Hanoi about a troubled school that fortunately has her as an advocate for improvement so I here amplify that passion! She told a compelling story of need, recalcitrant school boards, a charter school solution, and how the Obama administration in fact came to their aid. It's the Laupahoehoe Community Public Charter School. I'd earlier heard how she's interested in a bus project but hadn't then known the context. But at this table she continued her storyline with JB Bradshaw who works in the transmission-parts industry and has many contacts. One of the challenges to the charter school hinges on a bus for the kids with the conservative opponents pointing derisively to their lack of ability to transport the kids. So the table crackled with ideas including ways that HOlly's passion for the cause might get amplified for fund raising and other assistance. I'll ask her for more information so that this report gets more complete.




Ad: