Homeward Bound

I am indeed writing this as my family and I are homeward bound, around 38,000 feet over the Atlantic. There's about 2 hours left until our plane lands in Newark. 2,717 miles traveled, 940 miles to go. Our ground speed is 478 miles per hour. This seat map display is pretty cool! But all those numbers are not aligned at the exact same moment. The display changes between screens and the figures it rotates through update constantly. It's taken me a while to write just this, as I am terribly slow and clumsy with this iPad Mini keyboard. But it beats the tiny iPhone keyboard I was trying to blog with as we were standing in line to board our plane in Newark last weekend!

The dark and light brown areas
are dried tea--I stained this Bijou
tile while enjoying my first cup of
tea in Britain. It was Earl Grey.
The difference in intensity is simply
because I had to blot the large central
area in order to move the tile to
a safe place to dry. I didn't have time
to tangle it until we were on our
way back home.

Great Britain. That was our vacation destination! The kids and I had never been, and it's been 25 years since my husband had been to England. Our passports had expired earlier this year, so we renewed them at the start of summer, and made some plans. After all, we have precious few summers left that both kids will be free to go on vacations with us; once they start college, who knows what their availability will be!

This bijou tile was started and completed
at the Newark airport. The central design
was inspired by all of the the roundabouts
on British roadways.

It was a marvelous trip. I can't wait to tell you more about it!

(This post was updated on Saturday, August 2.)

I have a bit of an obsession with taking photos out of plane windows.
At the time this was taken, the combination of sun and clouds was
quite delightful. Soon after, the sky darkened, and we had to circle
around for a while, waiting for severe storms in Knoxville to calm
down before our pilot could land the plane. We got to watch the
lightning storm from the sky. On the ground, hail fell, and lots of
damage was done, though fortunately our home was not effected.