Well my time in Armenia has come to an end so I think it’s
time to tie up this edition of Little
Hamlin’s Excellent Adventure.
My first week at home has been a busy one as I’m diving headfirst into
the next chapter. I spent less
than 24 hours at home before heading north to Maine where I’ll be working on a
boat as part of the Maine Coastal Mapping Initiative. This is just a temporary gig through November, but it gives
me a chance to stay busy, be on the water, and buy some time while I look for
other jobs. And doing all of this
while living at Juniper Knoll lets me spend any of my extra time digesting my
experiences in Armenia while staring out at the ocean, a pastime I never seem
to tire of.
There’s typically not much to say about a plane ride home
that occurs without significant delays or flight cancellations, which mine
luckily did. This alone is a lucky
thing, but I found myself exceptionally lucky this time, and no, I didn’t get
upgraded to First Class. Instead I
found myself at a window seat in the second to last row of the 777, so far back
that when the plane angles up off the runway you hope it doesn’t leave you
behind. We flew north from Abu
Dhabi over much of Iran, and I was struck by the vast emptiness of the country
below. I admired the copper
mountains as I ate. They seemed to
go on forever. Then, after opening
my eyes from an attempted nap, I looked out the window to find the peaks of Mt.
Ararat right out my window. I saw
Lake Sevan down below. The large
town at the south had to be Vardenis, one of the places I visited with AEN. As we traveled north over the lake,
there was Tsovagyugh, a village where I taught about renewable energy. There were the small islands where I
did a cleanup with Birthright, and there was the peninsula home to Sevan
Monastery. It felt like I was
looking at my backyard. These
places had become so familiar that I had no problem spotting them from 36,000
ft. A few moments later I could
only see the blanket of clouds covering the mountains in the north, and my
extra goodbye to Armenia was over.
After that, I did what everyone does on excruciatingly long
flights: sleep, eat, watch a movie, repeat. Every once in a while I took a look at the new, high-tech
cockpit video feed that gave me the same view as the pilots, but I could never
see anything but clouds. As we
neared JFK, while returning our seat backs and tray tables to the upright and
locked positions with our seatbelt securely fastened, I took a glance out the
window and saw something familiar.
It was the first clear view of land I had had since watching Armenia go
by. This time, right below was the
long finger of Plum Island. There
were the distinct shapes of Little Neck and Great Neck jutting out into the
water. I followed Jeffery’s Neck
Road down into the center of Ipswich, and although we were too high for me to
discern it, I knew that right there was my house on the marsh. From the air, Ipswich seemed so close
to everything I had just left behind.
That’s something that made leaving Armenia a little easier. Although it seems so far, so far that
people don’t even know where I’ve been (Albania? Romania?), I know Armenia will
always be only a plane ride away.
So that’s the end of this chapter of Little Hamlin’s Excellent Adventure. Stay tuned for more adventures to come. We’ll see where this latest chapter,
Seeking Employment in America, takes me.
But for now, as we say in Armenian, hajoghutyun!
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