Bumpers and brake lights, 50# limit, the little things

I am not very often the passenger in a vehicle so our ride to the airport in Philadelphia was a rare opportunity for me to look around and really study the traffic as we inched along. It was bumpers and brake lights as far as the eye could see.


One of the benefits of the Northeast is the wealth of cultures found together there and the businesses established to meet the needs of those various cultural needs. You can literally find anything. It is very exciting to my wife and daughters – not so much for me.

What is excitement for the shoppers in my life is total exasperation for me. There are people from every culture in the world, speaking the language of their homeland and carrying on the traditions of their heritage; which is wonderful. The problem is that there are people, and people and more people.

I am not much on crowds, with the exception of church crowds. I love fellowship in crowds of church people. Unfortunately, most of the crowds we deal with are not church crowds. That coupled with the annoyed, abrupt (to the point of rudeness) people in this area makes large gatherings (especially on the road) exasperating for me. Having grown up in the south this has always been a culture shock for me.

Moving slowly through the traffic did make me a little glad to be flying instead of driving. But as with all things in life there are tradeoffs. The hardest tradeoff for travel by air is the limit to the luggage we can carry and the weight limit of each of those pieces. You have to understand that when we travel by car, whatever vehicle we take is packed to the max. It did not matter where we are going, who we are going to see or even the length of the stay.

I have packed a fifteen passenger van to the point that there was not room to put in an extra notebook much less another pair of shoes. This was because I traveled with six women – a wife and five daughters. Now imagine having to limit what is taken to under fifty pounds. It was difficult for my wife to condense what is essential to the space of one suitcase. It was almost upsetting for her to then have to repack to make the weight come out right.

After several attempts to bring the weight down it was decided that I would have to take less clothing to make things work. After I made the necessary adjustments we weighed the largest, most overstuffed suitcase and it weighed a little over the fifty pounds. We were both a little worried until the scale at the baggage checkpoint showed the bag to weigh 50.5#. My wife was ecstatic when the attendant let it through without any additional charge. I admit I had to smile, too.

It is the little things that either make or break us. This was one of those times when we were able to celebrate a victory, a little one, but a win none-the-less.