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<\/a><\/p>\nI left tired.\u00a0 There was no more time to lose.\u00a0 Whatever it took, Linda and I were getting on that plane and heading to Prague, away from the Fiscal Cliff, away from a dysfunctional country, away from school shootings and deficits and shouting.\u00a0 Just away.\u00a0 It was, after all, a vacation.<\/p>\n
I felt bad running away from something awful instead of running to something wonderful.\u00a0 I just didn\u2019t know what to expect, and the recent past was pushing quite forcefully at my back.<\/p>\n
My greatest fear in going was the airport and all that has happened since I last flew on 2000.\u00a0 Not to worry, everything went well.\u00a0 Taking off shoes and belts was just stupid. \u00a0Nobody touched my junk.\u00a0 The worst part of the whole trip was being so crowded on the plane that I couldn\u2019t move for seven hours.\u00a0 You think that\u2019s not so bad?\u00a0 You try it and come dancing off the plane in Frankfurt.\u00a0 Good luck.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Prague was\u2026 wonderful.\u00a0 Full of wonder.\u00a0 Different from anything else.\u00a0 An old city, it was hustling and bustling when Columbus landed in the West Indies and killed off the entire native population of Hispaniola.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t bombed, it wasn\u2019t destroyed by the Communists except in little ways\u00a0 It remained a magical place.\u00a0 We ate it up.\u00a0 We walked, we played tourist.\u00a0 I took Linda\u2019s picture, she took mine.\u00a0 We photographed our lunch of klobasa and rye bread.\u00a0 We were bold and photographed the police guy with the tactical vest laughing with his chums outside the Votofone store.\u00a0 I found the streetside pissoire and photographed that.\u00a0 I got close-ups of the instructions beside the automatic door that said that it cleaned itself automatically after one did one\u2019s beeznis.\u00a0 There was a poster of Julia Roberts on the side of the pissiore. I took her picture.\u00a0 The guy sitting in the window of the spa place with his feet in a tankful of fishies eating the dead skin off his tootsies?\u00a0 Photo.<\/p>\n
What happened was this.\u00a0 We went on vacation, my Love and I, and we relaxed.\u00a0 No cares or worries, no thoughts of having to go back.\u00a0 We were happy-go-lucky, and we loved it.\u00a0 The biggest decision we had to make was where to eat, and what.\u00a0 I ate sausages from street vendors on Wenceslas Square.\u00a0 It quickly became my favorite lunch.\u00a0 I became the little kid who would only eat the red things on his plate.\u00a0 Only in my case it was sausage.\u00a0 Linda was more exploratory in her cuisine, but being of Czech origin, she had grown up with the pork lard on bread and the dumplings with duck fat and the pigs head.\u00a0 I just wanted my daily sausage.\u00a0 Num.<\/p>\n
I fell in love.\u00a0 At the Charles Bridge, Linda and I locked a padlock with our names, the date, and a heart to the gate, then threw the key into the Vltava River.\u00a0 Our lock joined hundreds, thousands already there.<\/p>\n
The culture shock came when we had to come home.\u00a0 What was this strange place we had landed in?\u00a0 Was the cable lock on the Best Western front door to keep people out or in?\u00a0 Why were we all of a sudden depressed and hoping for nothing more than crawling into bed and getting over jet lag?\u00a0 Please, no politics and dysfunction.<\/p>\n
I want to go back.\u00a0 Not just back, but back for a very long time.\u00a0 I want the joy of Prague again.\u00a0 \u201cThere\u2019s no place like home\u201d just doesn\u2019t cut it anymore.\u00a0 When we landed in Boston, the passengers all cheered and clapped.\u00a0 Linda and I were the silent ones, sitting in wonder at all of these aliens, wondering if they had spent their vacations with their eyes shut tight.<\/p>\n
Five years.\u00a0 That\u2019s my hope.\u00a0 Five years to living full time in Prague.\u00a0 I\u2019ll have to lobby Linda for it, but I can be persuasive.\u00a0 We\u2019ll go back this Fall, and I\u2019ll work on her.\u00a0 We\u2019ll go back to the Charles Bridge and look for our heart padlocked to the gate to Heaven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1-3-13\u00a0 The prompt:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Make short end of the year lists What I bring with me\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What I leave behind I left tired.\u00a0 There was no more time to lose.\u00a0 Whatever it took, Linda and I were getting on that plane and heading to Prague, away from the Fiscal Cliff, away from a dysfunctional country, away […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-promptedwriting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}