I arrived at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Airport (AVP) around midnight last night, which is a miracle unto itself considering the U.S. Airways malarkey that was my flight from Orlando to Philadelphia and trying to make the connecting flight from PHL to AVP. My laser printer wasn’t so lucky — it didn’t make it on the PHL-AVP segment. Hopefully U.S. Airways will deliver it soon.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why on earth is Gail travelling with a laser printer?!?”

(If you know me, this isn’t such an outrageous idea. I travel with my photo printer, after all.)

One of the reasons I went to Orlando in the first place was to retrieve some of my things from Karl’s. I wasn’t able to bring it all back, but I need the laser printer for the cancer benefit I’m working on that takes place on August 21.

I also went to Orlando to:

1. visit Karl, of course!
2. use the America West/U.S. Airways voucher before August 25 (the flights to Vancouver or Seattle with that carrier were outrageous)
3. have an aerospace-themed weekend (more on this later).

In January of last year, I packed up my Vancouver apartment after nearly seven years and gave away all the furniture. The rest I distributed between my father’s apartment and Socar’s, but I gave some of the equipment to Karl to take back with him to Seattle to make it easier and cheaper to ship to Pennsylvania later. I’d been flying back and forth between Vancouver and New York for months, and with each trip I was given an increasingly hard time at U.S. Customs. I wanted to make it easier for myself later.

Little did any of us know that Karl’s company would be acquired shortly after, and offer him relocation to Orlando. But David and I saw this as an opportunity to rent a faster plane and make a trip out of it — visit Karl, the area, and pick up my things later. After David got sick we still planned to do it, but he didn’t get well enough to make the trip.

Which brings us to the present.

The weekend marked one year since I made a mad dash cross-country from Vancouver to Scranton — 20 anxiety-filled hours. I was sitting in a cafe with a friend in Vancouver on August 5 last year. She told me that her mother just had surgery to treat breast cancer (a double mastectomy), and literally moments later I received a phone call from David, telling me they’d found a mass in his lung at CMC and were keeping him for further tests.

From that moment, my world took on a surreal quality.

As much as I wanted to return to Vancouver last weekend to see my friends and family for the first time in a very trying year, it was wholly impractical cost- and time-wise. But I also couldn’t help but think of how the timing would affect me, emotionally. Deep down, I felt this past weekend would be better spent engaging in activities that were special to David and me, in places that were special to us. When Hugh died on July 26, I felt an especially strong pull to return to Pennsylvania and New York. David and Hugh were my family, and I wanted to feel closer to them. After all, accessibility to this area is the primary reason why I chose to live in Toronto. It was a tough decision to make, but I knew it was the right one.

Hugh’s ashes weren’t ready when I left Toronto, but I still wanted to make a trip to Rhinebeck.

I spent most of the past weekend at the Kennedy Space Center, the one place I would have loved to visit with David, had we made it to Florida. It was item #1 on my tourist agenda, but Karl’s suggestion of SkyVenture fit nicely with the aerospace theme. Thank you, Karl!