Foreign Soil, Snow, Western Terrain All Welcomed Newtown’s Summer Travelers

By Kendra Bobowick

Rose pedals rustle across the sand at a wedding in Mexico. The East Coast’s vibrant trees yield to sagebrush and open fields in Deadwood, S.D. One young woman stands in a huddle of children in Rwanda.

The small details of a smile, laughter, or the aroma of roses all trigger memories of vacations Newtown residents spent relaxing, exploring the country, or volunteering this summer. A glimpse through their scrapbooks reveals where residents went during the summer months. Through narrative e-mails, web logs (blogs), and phone conversations, vacationers unraveled the threads that made up the rich colors of their trips away from home.

Mary Stankey took the trip of her life, she said, when she attended her son’s wedding in Puerto Morelos, Mexico. Remembering the silhouettes of people gathered by the shore, she said: “It was a little group in the evening. It was gorgeous with a blue carpet and white rose pedals thrown around.” She described the ceremony as small, “so nice.”

“This was the trip of my life, tropical heat wave, water, it was the greatest trip we’ve ever had,” Ms Stankey said.

Also visiting shores filled with salty morning mists and sand ridged and rippled with waves was Kerri Mubarek. With her family, Ms Mubarek took a roughly 3½-hour car ride to Chatham, Cape Cod. With her husband and children, she has gone to the vacationland in Massachusetts for the last ten years.

“This is a great family time for us,” she said. From one summer to the next she has seen the nostalgia grow in her children. “From year to year they will remember things or they will say, ‘Oh, last year I was too short for that, and I am taller now,’ or they might say, ‘That’s the beach we went clamming on.’” Reflecting on this summer’s trip, she said, “It’s nice to see their memories.”

Whale watching, swimming, music, and more filled the family’s time in Chatham. Ms Mubarek recalls some special moments of her own, however. “One great memory for me is the sunset at the beach and flying kites.”

Unlike a family vacation, one husband-and-wife team took advantage of retirement and traveled for five weeks. Covering more than 8,000 miles, Karen and Vincent Weis set out to visit friends, national parks, monuments, and more. Going west, Ms Weis wrote in an e-mail, “It is one of the most beautiful and different areas of this country.”

They stopped at the Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio to see their granddaughter. Ms Weis wrote: “The base has one of the most fantastic museums we have ever visited.” Located at the base is an air force museum housings a historic fleet of Air Force planes. The couple also visited Orville and Wilber Wright’s bicycle shop and museum.

The Weises pushed further toward the West Coast and crossed the Black Hills of South Dakota, stopped at a relative’s near the Crazy Horse Monument, saw the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Wall Drug with advertising billboards that spot the roadside for hundreds of miles before travelers find the destination — Deadwood, S.D., with its small main strip of gambling saloons and steak houses, noted the final resting places of Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane, and continued over the American terrain.

“We traveled through so many states with the fields and fields of corn and grains,” wrote Ms Weis. The couple also saw wind fields — rows of windmills used to generate renewable energy.

“We were quite impressed and wondered why we see no wind fields here,” she wrote.

The couple also saw the Big Horn Mountains and peaks, continued through Yellowstone National Park, Salt Lake City, Utah, met with family members in Flagstaff, Ariz., moved across New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and into Missouri.

“I have never really seen these areas, only flew over, and perhaps may never go back. This trip alerted me to how different the different states are,” said Ms Weis who, like many, agreed with the name Big Sky for Montana. “You can see for miles because of the flat terrain.”

Lack of rain and blue skies created unlimited visibility, she said. “If anyone had told me this type of land existed in our country I would have questioned them. Everyone needs to see these areas.”

Despite the awe inspired by the changing panorama as Ms Weis crossed the country, she said: “Would I live there? Never. I would miss the green of Connecticut.” Despite the national monuments, natural wonders, and history nestled in different small towns across the United States, Ms Weis prefers the familiarity of home.

 “I was so happy when things started to green up when we entered Oklahoma,” she wrote. She also likes the New England climate as she describes a desolate and arid scene. “To this day I feel for the cattle out west who stand in 100-degree weather in treeless fields of sage brush with the only protection from the heat being a road side sign. If you saw a tree, it was usually only a burnt skeleton destroyed by lightning.”

Nine Weeks In Rwanda

Also sweating in the humid climate of her summer surroundings was resident and student Dana Happel, who wrote a blog about her nine weeks in Rwanda. She made regular entries in what is essentially an electronic journal found online at danainrwanda.blogspot.com.

Her trip’s vivid account begins with her day-to-day routines. In the conversational manner of blogs she wrote: “Between hanging out with giraffes in the National Park, teaching tic-tac-toe to street kids, and hiking mountains to get to church, I have been very busy … I’ll give you a little glimpse of rural Rwandan life as I saw it yesterday. We were going to a church way out near the Congo border, which was supposed to take four hours. Now keep in mind that there are 15 of us plus a baby squished in a very beat up van. Every time we go anywhere the driver is putting the van back together. Sometimes it’s a mirror that falls off, sometimes it’s the exhaust pipe.

“So we begin our adventure at 5 am and just down the road the tail pipe falls off, so he fixes that and we continue. Around 6:30 we pop a tire. We spend some time fixing that and then continue. Around 9 we start hitting really rundown roads as we enter the more rural areas. Many times we had to get out and walk because the van couldn’t make it with so many people. There were many prayers being said as we came close to falling off cliffs, even the translator was talking about meeting Jesus sooner rather than later and the driver kept gasping!”

Noting more van failures and rough traveling, the group finally headed for the last part of their journey top church — a 20-minute hike. Dana finished writing about this one episode by stating: “One of the Rwandans pointed to a little building on the top of the next mountain over and told us that was the church. We thought he was kidding.”

Daily struggles of everyday life aside, she said: “Even though it was a huge trek to get there, the views were beautiful! Rwanda is the most beautiful country ever.”

In another entry, she notes: “As promised, I will share a few cultural differences between the good old North Eastern US and Central Rwanda.” She lists paragraphs of differences, beginning with their culture.

“Visitors come over at all hours, any day, unannounced and you are expected to drop whatever you are doing to visit with them,” she wrote. “Visitors also must be escorted part-way home when they leave.” She observed: “People are valued very highly here. Family and friends come before anything else, which is why visiting is so important.”

She next offered the stark impositions of poverty, writing: “Pay is so low. The teachers for the Early Learning Program earn 1 dollar a day. The help who clean the house, cook, and do laundry earn 2 dollars a day for working 8 to 9 hours — it’s crazy. Things are not cheap here either. They are just as expensive if not more expensive than the US. Many people can’t afford to eat. Even kids in our Early Learning Program go days at a time without eating…”

And another reminder: “I went over to the orphanage to spend some time with the kids. It broke my heart to see which of the kids from the Early Learning Program are in the orphanage. The kids there are adorable. There is a six-month-old (at least that is my estimate) baby there who is adorable. I want to bring her home with me!”

Other moments of her trip mended the breaks poverty placed in her heart. One blog entry states: “Today after returning from town we went down the street from where we live to a vegetable stand to buy from the local people. We got followed by a bunch of kids and adults, because it’s so rare to see white people here. The little kids all ran up and were holding my hands as we were walking. It’s adorable.”

Enjoying a colder vacation, Newtown High School juniors Jamie Walsh and Matt Taylor visited Matt’s older brother, Chris Taylor. The teens had their feet planted firmly in the snow of Mount Hood in Oregon. Parents Steve and Angie Taylor said the students are both avid snowboarders, and sent along photos of a whitewashed backdrop of sloping mountainside with a boy suspended mid-jump on his snowboard.