The wide, wide world. Still the best healing intervention for our narrow, narrow minds and souls.

Just a quick catch up post this morning. Rebekah made it out of Newark Friday evening before the snow started to cancel flights. Her journey from Frankfurt to Bahrain (via Riyadh) is currently tracking the west coast of Turkey (9:00 am) before crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

If you have not seen yesterday’s post (The Great Bahrain Adventure) go back and take a moment. All I did was to outline a fraction of this past week’s travel frustrations; but it was enough to make this important point: Writers never have to make stuff up! The truth is always more fantastical than fiction.

I hope to have more from Rebekah’s time in Bahrain over the next week or so. Stay tuned.

Air space:

Check out these images. I grabbed them via screenshot from a tracking app. The first shows Rebekah over Kosovo, the second pans out to show the context, then the third puts her plane just off the coast from Izmir, Turkey.

Now look again, more closely, at the image with all the yellow planes. Do you notice anything interesting? Check one more time… I’m sure you noticed how relatively empty the airspace is over Ukraine? To me that is telling, and a little unnerving.

By this time, just a short while after I started writing, the tracking chart shows that Rebekah is passing exactly over one of my favorite places in the Mediterranean. The icon for her Airbus A330-343 is at 39,000 feet, right over the town of Lindos on the island of Rhodes.

The image of Rebekah over Rhodes brings to mind a great story I have from my visit to Lindos. If you will indulge me for a paragraph or two I will try to share the abridged version.

“Lost in the loo in Lindos”

The year was 1975. I was 19 and traveling with ragtag group of international Bible school participants on a three-month odyssey that went from the UK through France, Italy, then Greece over to Israel, on into Turkey, up through Eastern Europe into the USSR, back through Romania and Yugoslavia, on to Austria and Germany, finishing up in the Netherlands before returning through Belgium and back to the UK.

I still have my journal, where I listed 15 countries (which today would translate into around 20, counting now sovereign nations such as Ukraine, Moldova, Slovenia etc.)

Mostly the trip was in our decrepit bus and ancient truck; both broke down on a regular basis, as you can see by the illustration I sketched in Turkey. But we did cruise from Athens to Haifa and back. On the return leg we stopped on the island of Rhodes, where six of us rented three motorbikes and rode 60 kilometers west to see the Crusader castle in Lindos (The image below is shamelessly copied from a Greek travel guide).

It was an idyllic day, including running out of gas, having one of the bikes break down, and making it to the tender with only 30-seconds to spare (cruise ships do not wait).

But the signature story happened at the Crusader castle in Lindos, where I heard a faint plaintive cry coming from an outbuilding as I was walking away to where we had parked the bikes. It was Linda, one of our group. I ended up having to break in and rescue my friend from a locked restroom!

Linda is still a great friend. And, to this day, “Locked in the loo in Lindos” has remained a catchphrase.

Travel:

So maybe I still have the travel bug? Of course I do. Just seeing this image of Rebekah’s plane, moving over Europe, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, then the Mediterranean, before hitting the big sandbox known as the Middle East, has me wanting so much to be there with her.

The wide, wide world. Still the best healing intervention for our narrow, narrow minds and souls.

Godspeed. Hug that grandson for me. And, please, don’t get locked in some obscure Middle Eastern loo!

– DEREK