Welcome to Orlando

Air travel is very anticlimactic, especially to someone who does not travel very often. Someone like me, for example. There is packing and planning and then the nervous trip to and through the airport, the confusion at the security gate, the interpretation of the flight number and airport terminal... and then suddenly you are sitting down in an uncomfortable chair surrounded by dozens of uncomfortable people. And then you remember what air travel is and how ultimately boring it is. It shouldn't be boring - you go from one end of the country to another in a matter of minutes: for me, I went 650 miles in just over an hour. But it was boring.

And I didn't get to enjoy it much because I overslept like an idiot. My flight was at 6:45 and Bronwen woke me up at 5:30. So that was annoying. But it wasn't a bad trip. Just very businesslike. And I guess that's the part that confuses me about airline travel. It all seems very formal and fancy and... almost exotic. There is the whiff of adventure and even luxury in an airport, and then reality hits and you remember the cold, damp air inside the jet, the seats, the tiny windows. I'm not complaining, because I really did appreciate how smooth and fast and worry-free the flight was.

So now I am back in Orlando. I am back at the Hard Rock Hotel, in fact, to help with a final Velvet Sessions show. My business here isn't the point. What is the point, however, is that it feels extremely strange to be back. I haven't been gone for very long - only two weeks - so I don't have any kind of nostalgia built up yet. But it is all so familiar that I don't feel like I'm visiting. I just feel like I'm here because I belong here; because I live here. But I don't live here. I have no home here. I have no place to go to (I have a hotel, of course) because my home is in North Carolina, which still does not feel like home just yet (mainly because it's so great that I can't believe that it actually is home). I'm looking forward to going home on Friday, but I don't think that I'll have that usual sense of 'thank god I'm finally home' relief, because I don't feel like I've actually left.

I'm halfway between homes right now, and so both places feel like home, and neither place feel like home. Kinda weird.