Once Were Lost..

But Now Are Found...

I cannot explain how ecstatic I was to get a wee gift from my friend Noreen at lunch today..It is a long story but the short version is:

In 1997, I took an unpaid leave from work to spend several months camping in the southwest USA. In those days I didn't keep travel journals, but instead, on this trip, I regularly wrote long descriptive letters to my friend Noreen documenting my adventures and she promised that she would keep them and return them to me when I came home; that way I would have at least a partial record of my trip. 

Well, she was so enamoured with the letters that she passed them around to our friends back home and when I returned, she no longer had them (!) and didn't know who did!  BUT, she promised she would track them down for me...but, alas, that never happened and to this day, I thought they were lost forever. 

Well they were not. At some time over the  years, she did track them down and set them aside, and then forgot about them until a week or so ago when I mentioned how much I lamented losing those letters. Well, it seemed that she did get them back long ago, but didn't know where they were now, but she promised she would search for them. And she did. She attacked her storage locker and ploughed her way through old boxes she had stashed away from various moves... and Voila! There they were! 

She bound them all up and presented them to me today and I have spent the entire afternoon reading through them..being reminded of so many things I had forgotten.I have always remembered the scenery and the landscapes as they are quite familiar to me as I have revisited those areas many times, but the details were missing, the ups and downs of camping, the characters I met, the trials and tribulations of a Jeep that kept me in repair shops, the absurdities that made me laugh and write home about..It has all come back to me today.

Noreen has given me the best gift ever! Memories.

PS: One thing I had absolutely forgotten was that I had intended to do a rafting trip down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. Well it all came back clearly today as there in the letters, was the form I had been given by the rafting company (extra) and the comments I had made on it before sending it home to Noreen....The reference in my comments to Pam, a teaching colleague, was that she had done that ride and was seriously injured on the trip and she and another colleague of ours begged me not to do it...too dangerous they said...I guess their advice and that form did the trick as in the end, I did not sign up. It was probably a wise decision given that list of dire risks...:))

PPS: And also a bonus included in my "gift"?  Another set of letters I had sent to her on an earlier solo camping trip to the southwest - and had totally forgotten about - the letters, not the trip!