Day 21 – Portland, ME

My visit to Portland, ME was 1 of the more ‘lonely’ legs of this journey, but purely by choice.  I was supposed to arrive late Sunday night and had accommodations set up courtesy of a Realtor colleague in Charlottesville.  She’d reached out to me via Twitter (yay social media!) and put me in contact with her brother, who lives in Portland.  

Everything was set up and good to go, I’d arrive there late that night, sleep, then wake up and have a full day to explore the city!  Unfortunately as I was getting ready to leave Chicago I received a text from TripIt letting me know that my flight to JFK was delayed.  Upon arrival at the airport I found out that it was delayed even longer and I was going to miss my connection to Portland.  I was actually OK with this fact because it was the FIRST FLIGHT off the ENTIRE month that was delayed – so 1 out of what? 23 or 24 at the point?  Not bad.

Initially there was some confusion about if I was going to be able to get to Portland at all because of the way that I had other flights arranged, etc… but, as usual, the level of customer service that I received from JetBlue was AWESOME!  I would have to overnight at JFK, but could head up to Portland the following morning.  The long, loud night at JFK was good for me and gave me a chance to really start the introspective part of this journey as I entered my last week, but I’ll get into that during later posts.

Anyways, I finally got to Portland where it was chilly, rainy, and foggy.  Apparently it had been gorgeous the day before.  Just my luck!  But I wasn’t going to let that stop me!  I explored the downtown area and took up some of the sights and Yelp! recommendations.  Everyone that I met was VERY nice and easy to talk to and they all asked about the bags on my back and ‘what my deal’ was.  For a variety of reasons I didn’t want to have deep conversations on Monday, so what I got instead was ‘yeah, my so and so had cancer’.  Again and again and again.

I was actually a little annoyed at this point… I couldn’t escape it.  And I guess that was the point.  Cancer is as much a part of all of our lives as the air we breathe.  So the question is what are we going to do about it?  I’m going to continue to make positive connections, which I did in Portland later in the day.  Steinar recommended a place to eat and while sitting at the bar I got to talking to the guy 2 down from me.  He’s a musician.  One who lost a close friend to cancer and has another friend who’s battling cancer.  We talked and traded stories and ended up having a good time.

The moral of the story?  Your day (week, month, year, relationship, job, whatever) won’t always turn out the way that you want it to; that’s just a fact of life.  The question is how will you react to that?  If we keep an open mind and let things happen we can find more opportunities.  I’m glad that I didn’t blow my dinner partner off when he kept talking.  Instead I made a new friend and learned that there’s opportunity in everything.

PS – I’m in Seattle right now and have a crazy, fun, and full day planned tomorrow followed by a night full of flying (yay for another red-eye to JFK) so I may not have time to update the blog, but don’t worry, come Saturday afternoon I’ll find myself in San Juan, PR.  I will be staying there for a whole 4 days!  I haven’t been in the same place for more than 48 hours in over 3 weeks and I can’t wait!!!

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