Selfie Stick V Mind's Eye.

My Darling Boy is off on a grand adventure. He's in Japan skiing with his Grandfather! It's his first Big Trip. Oh sure he's been on planes up and down the east coast like east coasters do, but he had nerves about how he was gonna manage the long long time on the plane to get to the snow. He was nervous and excited in equal measure.

I can't remember too much about my first Big Trip plane ride. My then hubster ( Zig's grandfather - who has taken him off skiing) and I went to Singapore for a couple of weeks. Yeh people thought that was a little nuts, cos Singapore was just a stop over place good for sleeping away some jet lag on the way home from somewhere fabulous, hardly a destination in it's own right. But I tell you simply it was dead easy to spend a fortnight in that fantastic city. It rained every day at 3pm and we'd walk off the wet and be dry by 5. Of course the touristy spots all got a look in but because we had plenty of time we got to explore the back streets too. I reckon those streets and alley ways are long gone replaced by glass and flash, but I remember the old stuff, and I am pleased to have those pictures in my mind, if not memorialised on Facebook.

I don't remember the plane ride though.

Years later when it was just my girl and me, we took off for the holiday of a lifetime - 6 weeks in Europe. This was back in the day when planes weren't crowded and we luckily plonked ourselves in the back row and she stretched out and slept both coming and going. Yeh I remember that. Oh and I remember that smoking was allowed on the plane! Can you imagine that NOW? It was truly disgusting, and I say this even though at that time I was a stinking smoker.

But the ride to foreign places was only the start. The adventures we had are where the memories were built. Oh sure we did all the touristy stuff and we have real photos on real paper that were developed at the chemist, at great expense,  in a photo album, and then there are the mind's eye memories that are just ours. Like the afternoon we spent on a local bus riding out into the backwaters of Hong Kong and getting out at the terminus with no clue where we were and no idea how to get back and to add to the excitement some bloke with a sinister face started to follow us. No photos of that afternoon, but the suburban food markets and the crowds and this horrid bloke are etched in the back of our brains.
Oh and then there was another local bus ride when my girl threw up and threw up and threw up some more, into my dress and her jumper, and we had to go to the police station to clean ourselves up because in the alternate public loos, her chunder would have been the cleanest most pleasant thing there.

Stevie and I have literally hundreds and thousands of digital photos of our adventures, that we almost never re-visit, but the memories of losing a train in Hungary, or living through the Tsunami in the Maldives, or acting like lunatics to clear a space on the bus in Croatia, and heaps more bits of silliness and strangeness are never far from mind.

I guess my point is that I hope my Darling Boy is taking time to etch some brain pictures as well as give his camera and phone a work out.

The selfie-stick nutcases who have photos but see nothing are just sad cases I reckon. Far more long lasting are the memories of the smell of the salt water spray or the street food, and the feel of the icy wind and the taste of the snow. Just leave the Yellow Snow well alone, walk away from the Yellow Snow.