Georgia day 3

September 28

This evening the High Holidays began, the holiest season of the Jewish calendar. We have the rest of our trip mapped out from here on in, to accommodate the series of holidays that will follow. We will be spending both days of Rosh Hashanah here in Atlanta, as well as Shabbat, which follows immediately thereafter. We have been in touch with Belle and Fred in Columbia, SC and are now scheduled to reach them Saturday afternoon. Belle is inviting all the local relatives for this family event, and I'm looking forward to seeing so many of them in one place. We world-travelers have a measure of celebrity attached to us, and Belle, now 98 years old and a celebrity in her own right, wants to do this visit properly. We met her younger (also nonagenarian) sisters in Phoenix and I have been looking forward to seeing Belle ever since. After we leave Belle, we are scheduled to visit Razelle's brother Ralph and family in Baltimore during the intermediate days before Yom Kippur, and then be in Hampton, VA for Yom Kippur services with Rabbi Gila Dror. We are very excited about the prospects of being in her synagogue for this occasion. From there we plan to fit in Connecticut so we can visit Razelle's friends and family and also to visit Razelle's parents' graves; and finally, we plan to spend Sukkot with my brother Monte before we fly out of Kennedy Airport to London.

That brings me to the hotel reservation in London. This morning I committed us to paying for two nights at the Ibis Heathrow, even though we will only actually sleep there the first night. This is because our check-out time on the second day for our flight to Israel is so many hours after their regular check-out time that it's cheaper to pay for an extra day than to pay the hourly rate for those extra hours.

Before Rosh Hashanah began, Aunt Joan had been busy preparing dishes for the guests she will be hosting after services on the first day, and also preparing something to take to our hosts this evening. Uncle Sandy got replacement watermelons in exchange for the bad one he'd bought earlier. Aunt Joan also had some cantaloupes to go with these, but a news item today said that some people had died from eating contaminated melons grown in Colorado, so we passed on eating the cantaloupe. We wanted to finish this trip without risk of contracting a food-borne disease. The prestigious Center for Disease Control is here in Atlanta, so we shouldn't have been so concerned – both Aunt Joan and Uncle Sandy thought we were being overly cautious, and I'm sure they were right – but you never know....

Around noon, Razelle and I drove off in our van to look for a gift of our own for this evening's hosts. I remembered there was a Walmart next to a restaurant Aunt Joan and Uncle Sandy took me to last December. The restaurant was called "Five Guys, Burgers and Fries." I located these with Google Maps and then programmed my GPS to take us there. There were several reasons I wanted to revisit this particular Walmart, even though there is a Walmart that is closer. I wanted to see if there were any campers using this particular Walmart parking lot (I had seen one there back in December, but no, there weren't any today). I wanted Razelle to be able to taste the award-winning fries this restaurant was famous for, and I wanted her to be able to grab a few fistfuls of the genuine unshelled Georgia peanuts they offer their customers for free. And, I wanted to visit the Walmart Garden Shop to get a gift planter with houseplants I knew would be easy for our hosts to care for. In December I had taken Aunt Joan in there to buy her an orchid plant, for her orchid collection, so I knew this section of Walmart would have what we were looking for.

All missions accomplished, we hurried back so Razelle could do a load of laundry in Aunt Joan's washing machine and dryer and have this task completed by 5:00 PM, before the start of Rosh Hashanah.

At sunset, Rosh Hashanah officially began, marking the entrance of the new Hebrew Calendar year of 5772. In that regard, Razelle and I are now in our second year of this four-month round-the-world trip (5771 and now 5772) . Razelle and I routinely attend services in the morning and rarely at night, so attending services tonight was not in our plans. We were looking forward to the holiday meal Aunt Joan and Uncle Sandy had invited us to participate in with them at their friends' home. We four all piled into Uncle Sandy's car, with Aunt Joan as navigator. She was in charge of their GPS and I had mine with me as well in the back seat. Razelle read the address to me off a note Aunt Joan handed her and we had fun driving all the way there comparing GPS functions. Mine in the back seat always counted down the tenths of a mile sooner than theirs on the dashboard up front, defying the laws of physics, as it were (it should have been the other way around, when you think about). We reached our hosts' home in the Sandy Springs/Roswell GA area and were very impressed by the wooded setting, the architecture and size of their home. Razelle and I presented our gift of houseplants to our hostess. Uncle Sandy and Aunt Joan were impressed that we had come with it. They hadn't seen it until that moment. Our hostess was thrilled to receive plants as a gift. I gave her some instruction on how to care for them and we set them in the appropriate window.

Soon, we were all seated around a set of tables pushed together. We were about 18 people, including 3 or 4 families, with children from infants to preschool to teenage; their parents and grandparents. The mood was happy and festive. Uncle Sandy chanted the blessings over the wine and bread. I looked around and asked with a wink, "Which of you kids will be doing the 'four questions?'" It felt like a Passover Seder. Razelle and I really enjoyed being among these families and watching how they all interacted so nicely. The food was great and the conversation lively; it covered topics from the situation in the Middle East to the logistics of world travel, from child rearing to food recipes. Razelle presented a souvenir magnet of Jerusalem to each of the families and singles at the table as a memento of the occasion.

When the time finally came to return home, Aunt Joan and I got out our GPSs and tried to help navigate Uncle Sandy back home. My GPS had been switched off so it took a long time to find a signal and was useless during the critical first part of the journey in the labyrinth of rural streets. Uncle Sandy was pleased that his GPS was more reliable than mine. I know that I couldn't have gotten as far as I had across the US with nary a hitch without my GPS and I didn't mind that he thought mine was inferior to his. It got me where I had to go and I valued it very much, just the same.

It was late when we returned to my aunt and uncle's place and we were full of good food and glowing from good company. We stay up just a little while longer to keep the mood going, but soon retired to our separate quarters.

It is a new year, on the Hebrew calendar at least, and we have new experiences to look forward to tomorrow.

And as they say in Atlanta, tomorrow is another day.