I am reading through the threads and taking notes so I can do one BIGGG update on the Cheerleading thread.... it is long overdue. Well we are just back from a major road trip -- it was Mahmoud's first real look outside Texas, other than his POE in Chicago and subsequent flight south to Texas. So he got an eyeful, to say the least. We drove up to Ohio to visit my family, travelling through Texas, then Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. We stayed a few days there in Ohio, then drove west through Indiana to our family farm in Illinois, where we stayed a few more days. And then we hit the road again, driving down through Missouri and Oklahoma all the way back to South Texas. It's about 2850 miles total *whew*.
He saw downtown Dallas, Memphis, Nashville, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and innumerable smaller cities, towns, villages, hamlets. He saw mile after mile of pastures filled with cattle, horses, even sheep and goats; river after river; rolling green hills and valleys of woods and fields, and pancake-flat farmland with acre after acre brimming with corn, beans, wheat, grapes, all sorts of things. His eyes were wide, just looking and looking.
He got to meet a lot of my relatives for the first time (I have a rather large extended family lol -- grandmother, aunts & uncles, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins-twice-removed and on down the chain.) Some of them (well the ones out on the farm) have never ever met *any* foreign person before, much less an Arab Muslim, and here I go bringing them a Palestinian to gawk at. So it was an educational experience for all
Mahmoud is a very personable, friendly guy, and they all liked him very much. It's harvest time on our farm (we grow beans and corn -- of course
) so he rode the combine and the tractor, and then he rode on the big truck carrying the stuff to the Illinois river where it's weighed and sold. There, he saw hundreds of trucks lining up, all dumping tons and tons of food onto huge barges, where it travels south to the Mississippi River and on down to New Orleans. The reality is still sinking into his mind -- there is just SO MUCH FOOD in this country -- it's beyond comprehension. He told his family "I think it's enough in America to feed the whole world." There's no way to explain or even understand a mere description of how big this country is -- you just have to drive the miles and actually see it/experience it for yourself. He was fascinated with how different the landscape is in different parts of the country. He loves seeing the largest cities with massive downtown areas and tall buildings, and he was absolutely stunned at the massive size of the Mississippi River. (And he hasn't even seen the mountains or the coasts or the deserts yet -- hopefully he'll be seeing some of that on our next trip.)
Mahmoud drove the whole way
straight through, only making pit stops for gas, food, etc., and I was the navigator. It was about 20 hours to Ohio, then about 7 hours to the farm, then another 16 hours back to South Texas. He's a very good driver. We're beat, but we had a great time. I'm scanning the threads for all the breaking news, and will do the updates later today. May sleep a bit more first. PM me if I overlook something !
-MK
