I haven't been everywhere....yet

I wrote this last weekend as I was driving with my super awesome wife to a small town on the border with Indiana. I think the fact that I was travelinghelped inspire it.

I think that the world has become smaller since I was a kid. I remember long, long, long road trips before mp3 players and portable DVD players. I was born in Santa Ana, California and we moved around quite a bit until my dad got a job in Texas. I remember that the flight to Midland, Texas from California was my first trip ever on an airplane. The stewardess asked me if I wanted anything and I asked for a hotdog. She said she would see what she could do. ( I am still waiting for that hotdog, Southwest Airlines!!!!!) I was 6 years old.
I grew up in that small town in Texas where oil and football was king. I was not very good at either and it turned out neither was Midland for very long. The oil boom that initially brought us there went bust not long after we got there but that strange mystical inertia which governs many small towns had worked its magic on my parents and we stayed.
I did not go very many places outside the American West for most of my growing up years. (A few trips to California to visit family, to New Mexico to go camping and Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon, that sort of thing.) When I turned 20, I left home to serve a mission for my church and lived first in Provo, Utah and then in Southern California for 2 years. I returned home to Texas for a couple of months before I got accepted to BYU in Utah. I lived there in Provo for 6 years in the same apartment complex about two blocks from campus. There is a strange routine in Provo that happens every semester. Everyone moves to a new apartment every four months, usually seeking the love of their life. So the fact that I stayed in one place for 6 whole years was something of a local oddity.
After college, I went and lived in the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific for three months as an artist. It was my first time outside of the country. ( I am sure that many more blogs will explore those experiences.) On the way home from Tonga, I stopped for about a week in Auckland, New Zealand, which is probably the coolest place I have ever been.
After Tonga, I was back in Texas for two years working at a junior college until I got accepted to law school. While there, a friend approached me and asked if I would accompany him and his daughter to Paris, France and London, England. That was awesome, especially seeing Les Miserables in the West End in London and the Rodin Museum in Paris.
I got accepted to law school in New Orleans which is an amazing place. It is one of the few places left in America which has any sort of personality. (Also on the list is Chicago, Memphis, Boston, and Washington DC.) It has not yet been stripped of interest by the antiseptic of strip malls and franchises…at least until Katrina.
I was living in New Orleans, in Uptown, for about one month when Hurricane Katrina struck. I was luckily out of town that weekend at a church conference. Unfortunately I could not get home to retrieve any of my stuff. I had one law book, my scriptures and two changes of clothes. A friend helped me get accepted as an emergency transfer to Arizona State University but while I was on my way to the school, they called and said they had changed their minds. (ASU, I shake my fist at thee!!!!!) Anyway I ended up at Chapman University in Orange County. Funny how I always seem to end up back in California. I spent the rest of the semester and then I had go back to New Orleans. Meanwhile I had met my future wife, who was in Chicago, through an online dating site. So I spent so time out there as well as Memphis where her dad lived. Since our marriage, I have visited Washington DC, Boston, New York City, and Israel.
One thing that seems to stick out in my mind of all the places I have lived is that on a basic level all people are pretty much the same.

States I have visited:
Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, Arkansas, Michigan

Countries I have visited:
Israel, France, England, Mexico, Kingdom of Tonga, New Zealand