Goodbye sweet Trotters

With a heavy heart, I packed my bags for the last time and got ready for the flight home. I picked up a few extra things on tour and getting that luggage in my suitcase was quite the task. Somehow I manage and after a surprisingly unemotional goodbye (all business for the road warriors), I part ways with my globetrotter family and on to san diego. Not before I can listen to some Biggie on the Ipod and take down some BBQ pulled pork at the Neely restaurant (they have a show on the food network) and suck down a bloody mary. As I started this trip I shall also end it with a refreshing $15 drink at an airport bar.

As I sit on the plane homewards bound I can not help but reflect on the people I have met and the places I have seen over the past 4.5 months. It was a true life experience to never be forgotten. I imagined myself sitting in a retirement home 50 years from now slurping noodles and telling some nurse, "I used to tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, I swear."

"Sure you did, crazy old bastard," she'll think as she politley smiles, then feeds me and dreads having to wipe my ass later because I can't do it myself.

As I travel back to life and back to reality, I make a mental point that I would not take anything back or do it differently in a million years. For someone with little to no formal training, I have had an extremely fortunate professional life and have avoided sitting in a cubicle for the most part. Without bragging, I feel confident saying that people would kill for the opportunity I have just had. Photographers would step over their own dying grandmothers to shoot for the Globetrotters and get paid.

On the way home, some fat man on the plane asked me what my favorite city was after all the ones I have visited. I looked at him straight in the eyes and said without hesitating, "San Diego."

The difference between myself and all of my friends on the long road with the Trotters is that I have amazing friends and family at home, which makes being on the road that much more difficult than someone with no ties. I missed my home constantly, while others dread going home, fighting to stay on the road for just one more tour. Is it living the dream out there, traveling the world for free or is it living in a suspended reality, I wonder?

Either way, after being gone for 1/3 of a year nothing makes me more happy than going home to my friends, family and my girl. "Would you do it again?" someone also asked me recently.

My answer: I love to travel and would do so for short stretches, but at the end of the day home is where the heart is. San Diego is my heart and unaabashedly I can say it is the place that makes me the happiest and most fulfilled.