Addendum: Jumping

My trip around the world included travel by train, by boat, by motorcycle, pedicab, tuk-tuk (motorized rickshaw), car, bicycle, bus, subway, elephant, and most of all: airplane.  By my calculation, I took no fewer than 19 flights in the first 4 months of my trip alone.  Luckily, every one of those flights landed safely.  Last Sunday, however, I took my first flight ever in which I took off, but didn't land...because I jumped out of the plane. With my trusty Skydive Las Vegas instructor Len strapped to my back, I dove from 15,000 feet toe the desert below, with the Hoover Dam and the Las Vegas strip in the periphery of my goggled vision.  After 45 seconds of free fall, I enjoyed a leisurely 5-minute float back to earth.

Those of you who followed this blog (hey mom!) know that I did a lot of jumping during my RTW journey. This was another big jump that I felt the need to share.

In case your interested, here's a video of my skydive. 

Where I've Been

visited 33 states (14.6%)
Create your own visited map of The World

Back.

"Reader, it is time for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port.  What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? Certainly there is one in the city from which you set out and to which you have returned after circling the world from book to book..."
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler


Don't you just love those moments when the book you hold in your hands is speaking directly to you? This tempest-tossed Julia has come to port in none other than New York, New York.  I was born here, and, after 9 months of traveling, it feels as if I've had somewhat of a rebirth of self...a self that is, in the end, a New Yorker.  So here I am.

But not before a fabulous final few weeks in Buenos Aires, where it's getting warmer (that's the thing about the southern hemisphere...) and living in the moment sometimes means jumping in the pool:

Then a twelve-hour farewell party which included everything I love most about Argentina: empanadas, Quilmes/Brahma, bolicheando, mate, boludeando, Fernet, dulce de leche, Drexler, picada, salsa golf (gracias, Nachitoo!), 3 a.m. truco, and most of all the incredible (really, super impresionante) friends that I made:

       

  Next off to Las Vegas for Maddy's 21st birthday!

Then to the nearby Hoover Dam to check out some vacuums...just kidding...actually, it's a remarkable architehtural and engineering feat.  To commemorate my visit, I (what else?) jumped:

And then off to Washington, D.C. with Erica for a surprise visit to Ms. Theo!  We had a wonderful reunion, and Erica and Cam churned out latkes like pros.  And I must say, there was something special to returning to the U.S. of A. and seeing those emblems special to our nation's capital:

Can't figure out how to rotate the Washington Monument

But there's the Capitol Building, correctly oriented

And while, as the song says, America is the "land that I love," seeing the people I love has brought me the most joy.  So that is what I'll be up to in the coming weeks.  Do drop a line and say hello!

And hey, one more thing.  Thanks for reading.  All of your comments and support have made me feel connected in a way I don't know how to describe.  In my journey around the world, I took comfort in knowing that my dear ones (and the occasional casual reader) were just a "Free WiFi!" sign away.  

The trip is over.  The adventure continues.

The good old days

Waves of talk from which surface the vocabularies of the most specialized and most exclusive diciplines and schools are poured over this eldery editor, whom at first glance you defined as ''a little man, shrunken and bent,'' not because he is more of a little man, more shrunken, more bent than so many others, or because the words ''little man, shrunken and bent'' are part of his way of expressing himself, but because he seems to have come from a world where they still - no: he seems to have emerged from a book where you still encounter - you've got it: he seems to have come from a world in which they still read books where you encounter ''little men, shrunken and bent.''

From Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler