There and Back and There Again

Next week we head for Ruidoso, New Mexico to visit friends and family. This will culminate a summer of travel for Davis: the Epic Road Trip through the southwest, the World Cup extravaganza to South Africa, and the Institute for Advanced Studies summer program in Park City, Utah. By mid-August he will entrench himself at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, preparing to buckle down on some heavy-duty studying and problem-solving.

I look at my son and am amazed by his string of accomplishments. I'm not talking about his academic success, though there have been plenty of those. I'm wowed by this young man. He attended school in the same district K through 12. We traveled a little, mainly car trips, mainly to New Mexico, with one tour through the South and one trip all the way to California. We did fly to Wyoming for Erin's Make-A-Wish trip, and we went with Davis and the Science Bowl team to Washington, D.C. when they qualified for nationals. He lived in Nashville for a few years as a toddler and pre-schooler. When he finally left home, he moved 90 miles away to Houston for college. All pretty prosaic. Not much adventure, not much reason to believe he was any different than any other small town kid who would get used to the place he was born and raised and choose to stick around there.

Except.

Except that Davis, the boy who ordered the same meal from Gina's every week for years, the youth who loved routine, the teen who never even asked to take a roadtrip with his buddies, has embraced the world. He made a wikimap of all the places he has made extended stays:



The true confessor in me says that there is no way, no how, I could have pulled those various adventures off as a young adult. Move to Hungary, live in an apartment, brave the market so I could make my meals? Uh uh. Pull off research jobs in upstate New York and downtown Pittsburgh? Wouldn't be brave enough to apply or talented enough to get hired. Live with 13 other people in a townhouse in DC? You must be kidding!

This way Davis can just pick up his life and move it somewhere else, and then turn back around and fit back into the routines of our home astounds me. Here is the project we have worked on between his various trips this summer. We finished last night, three-thousand pieces of devilment and delight: