My first visit to Yellowstone National Park was in kindergarden. My love for this park is one the reasons Martin says, “You can take Katie out of the country and put her in Berlin, but her heart is always in the country.” Yellowstone is – without a doubt – my all-time favorite National Park.
Here’s a seriously jaw-dropping youtube video my dad documented of a bugling elk in the park:
I caught him smiling in the co-pilot’s seat. It’s hard to catch him smiling in that chair. He likes to be pilot. But I like being pilot now, too!
My first solo flight + overnight out of town is coming up. I’m making Martin review emergency landing procedures with me. He’s reassigning the engine chapter of my textbook to me, and later we’re going to practice a few touch-and-gos where we land and immediately take off again on the remaining runway. ”Maybe I should just drive,” I keep telling him. The airport I’m flying to is incredibly challenging because of the mountains. I have little fears – the same kind you have on your first drive to another town or first interstate drive on an icy night.
I fell in love with the state of Wyoming this summer. I did not see it coming. The people have always been the kindest people during the 5-minute glimpses of life that I share with them in gas stations, restaurants, and all those quick-stop kind of places over the years.
For example, Martin and I needed two AA batteries for my headset when we were getting fuel for the plane this past weekend, and the airport didn’t have any. So the woman just pulled the batteries out of the remote control and handed them to us. ”You’ll be needing these,” she said and handed them to us, refusing payment.
I truly believe that an amazing happiness comes to our lives when we listen to our inner thoughts and follow the piece of us that urges us to keep dreaming big and keep going.
This weekend, I felt an enormous tug in my heart. For years and years, I have always been the pilot’s wife. I sat in the co-pilot’s seat and stared out the window at the beautiful world below us. But I never flew. I was too afraid. I didn’t think I was good enough, technical enough, smart enough…
Long before I started studying German, I used to write a lot of poetry for kids. Those of you who have been following Making This Home for a while have seen some of my poems here and there. Writing children’s poems seems like a past life, right along with flying an airplane and eating Mexican food. I guess when you move to a new country, you do sort of lead two lives. Every once and a while, the two merge in my heart.
By now, many of you are probably pretty familiar with our summer adventure in the United States. You know the one – where I got really brave and hopped in the pilot’s seat of an airplane, and where Martin got even braver by sacrificing the well-earned (and well-worn!) pilot’s seat for three whole months.
But what you don’t know are some of the details that followed – like the day we flew to Berlin and what it was like sitting waaaaay in the back of a commercial plane on the Exact Same Runway I used to take off from. Then there are the occasional little bits from my journal – like the day I made my 100th landing or attempted to land but wound up bouncing 20 feet of the ground! All of those little bits are right here on a brand new page where we live to tell:
I'm an American in Berlin, Germany. My apartment is 480 square feet; the kitchen's only 36. This blog chronicles the DIY approach my husband and I take in Making This Home.Read more.
