Newsletter from Jay Wilcox - October 2022: On Honeymoon (Or "I Can't Convey to You How Little I Know About Space Camp.")
Good morning/afternoon/evening!
I’m writing this in Richmond, Virginia on Monday, September 19—the first night of our honeymoon. I intend to chronicle our trip in this edition of the newsletter. Our destination: Adult Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. We’ll be there for three days doing space stuff, which may consist of eating astronaut ice cream and piloting flight simulators. I’m not yet sure what we’ll be doing, exactly. We’re not there yet, and this newsletter will be written over the course of the trip.
In Richmond, we ate some of the most decadent seafood of our lives and found a cool bookstore. Honestly, we navigate towns by typing “bookstore” into Google and going wherever that takes us. We figure there’s almost always cool stuff around bookstores.
By this paragraph, we’ve moved onto Raleigh, North Carolina. We woke up this morning in Richmond, at the alpaca farm. They had other animals there, too. We met a really cool, friendly turkey named Paquito. You could get him to gobble by making loud noises. He followed us all over the place, showing off his feathers. Hannah got to spray a bunch of the alpacas with a garden hose. They came running to the water and loved getting wet.
In Raleigh tonight, I ate some really good shrimp and grits. I’d better go easy on the seafood. We bought a boardgame version of Tetris and played it in our AirBnb. I lost to Hannah.
I’m not editing this edition of the newsletter much at all. Editing would almost defeat the purpose of writing it to live it, letting it all happen without judgment. I love driving and exploring towns with this person. That’s the most important part of this part of my life.
At this point in the newsletter, we’re in Bryson City, North Carolina. We rented this really cool cabin right on the river! This morning we went ziplining through the forest. At one point, we were at least a hundred feet in the air, up on top of the Smoky Mountains! I’d never been ziplining before, and perhaps this experience was a great way to get ready for whatever lies ahead at Space Camp. We head out for Space Camp in Huntsville early tomorrow morning. I keep asking Hannah questions about Space Camp, and she consistently responds with “I don’t know how to communicate to you how little I know about Space Camp.” We ate dinner tonight (and last night) at this Mexican restaurant called Poblano, right down the street from our cabin. The fish tacos were so (and I mean so) good. Decadent, one might say.
One must slow down and appreciate the moment. However, what do we do when we already are appreciating the moment? What do we do when we can’t squeeze any more juice out of a moment? A memory is like a bedsheet that slipped away in the middle of the night—you can draw it close and almost get it all the way around you, but the warmth isn’t all the way there anymore.
I feel no pressure to write this newsletter. I write to simultaneously squish this moment flat and spread it out and see every part of it, while also expanding this moment into full life in my mind.
Okay, we're home now--in fact, it's October 1 as I write this. None of the blue stuff above has been edited or thought about very hard. In fact, I'm not thinking very hard about this current paragraph, either. This edition of hte newsletter has honestly been a stream-of-conscious sort of thing to capture a vivid moment in my life.
We got to fly simulated missions, and at one point, we crashed the shuttle so hard the whole simulation reset. Hannah says, "Space Camp is hard!" On another mission, I got to do science experiments aboard an ISS replica and wound up getting left behind in orbit. I later flew a simulated lunar module and managed to successfully splash down on Earth.
10/10 would recommend
Hope you've been well! To infinity and beyond!
Infinite Regards,
Jay