Blessed Beyond Measure

Wow.

Okay, I know I've started posts on here with that word, so for emphasis, let me say it again, with feeling:

WOW.

I took last week off. I reach the end of each year with more vacation time left over than I can get paid for, so since our policy allows us to use last year's excess in the first quarter of this year, I thought I'd burn some. I've been wanting to get some things done - house projects (which I'm caught up on), guitar playing (which I'm woefully behind on), and sorting through pictures for our daughter's high school graduation slide show, which we'll present at the open house we have for her.

On that latter topic, I spent the week after Christmas - which I also took off work - going through all of our digital pics. I knocked that one out pretty handily.

Alas, we didn't go digital, camera-wise, until about 2003. So we have literally thousands of film pics - most with duplicates - to sort through. Rather than just cull the pictures of our daughter, we decided to create a number of categories, and sort them all. Eventually, we'll put them in albums by topic, and/or family, and/or year.

In the process of doing so, I came to a realization: I have been blessed beyond measure.

We have traveled extensively, some on our own, some owing to the fact that I've been fortunate to have been invited to speak at conferences across the nation, and beyond.

We've been to the Rockies of Colorado, and I've seen the world from the top of three 14,000-foot peaks. There is nothing on earth like that view. We've hiked through pine and aspen forests, gone rafting and fishing, and ridden alpine slides.

We've visited the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas, and driven their twisty roads. We've covered California, from San Diego to LA to the Temecula valley to San Francisco to Napa and Sonoma Valleys. We've viewed the coastal mountains, laid on the beach at Lake Tahoe, surrounded by forests and peaks. We've strolled the beaches of Coronado Island and Santa Monica, and visited numerous wineries. My wife and I were married in the Napa Valley in March of 1996, and the image of the vineyards with their bare vines promising the hope of a new harvest, with the brilliant yellow mustard growing between the rows of vines adding color to that promise, reminds me of the hope and promise we felt when we committed our lives to one another. And our harvest - at least mine - has been bountiful beyond my wildest dreams. If our life together were a wine, Robert Parker would have to develop a new rating scale.

We've been to Oregon - the coast and the mountains - and Washington. We've driven through forests of pines that seemed to reach to the sky, and gazed over wild rivers and beaches.

We've been to our nation's capital, with all its rich history and its monuments. We paid tribute to my Dad and my wife's Grandpa at the WWII Memorial shortly after its long-overdue completion, and we've walked dumbstruck through the Holocaust Museum, wondering at man's inhumanity to man.

We've been to New York City. We have a picture of us with the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the background and another with their conspicuous absence behind us, and we've been to Ground Zero. We've visited Ellis Island, where our ancestors first arrived on these shores. We've walked through Central Park, watched the St. Patrick's Day Parade, seen numerous Broadway shows, and just absorbed the energy of the city.

We've been to Boston, Cape Cod, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire. We saw the Old Man of the Mountain before his face fell off, and we've seen the Maine coast and the beautiful verdant mountains of Vermont. We've walked through Boston and seen our nation's history unfolded before us. We've played on the beach on Cape Cod, gone whale-watching there, and stayed in a B&B that was also a working farm - our daughter got to help gather the morning eggs - and was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

We've been to Disney World and Disneyland, and watched our daughter graduate from Dumbo and It's A Small World (thank God for the latter), through Space Mountain and Thunder Mountain Railroad, to the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster and the Tower of Terror.

We've been to Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Sanibel and Captiva Islands, and strolled their beautiful beaches. We've been to Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA, and enjoyed the charm of the Old South (and the not-so-healthy, but wonderful, food).

We've been to Hawaii - one of my favorite places on earth. We've been five times, courtesy of my work, and have been blessed to have visited all of the major islands at least once. We've been awestruck by its beauty, and enthralled by its people. We've discovered relatively unknown beaches, snorkeled with sea turtles, and our daughter has played with dolphins on several occasions.

We've been on numerous cruises in the Caribbean. We've been to Key West, St. Thomas, St. Lucia, Antigua, St. Maarten/St. Martin, Puerto Rico, Grand Cayman, Nassau, two private Bahamian islands, Haiti, Barbados, Aruba, Costa Rica, the Panama Canal, Cozumel, Jamaica, and other ports in Mexico. We've also been on individual trips to Tortola and Bermuda. On Tortola, we enjoyed a mile-long beach with less than a dozen other visitors.

We've been to the majestic Canadian Rockies - Banff and Lake Louise. We canoed the gorgeous Moraine Lake, rimmed with ten peaks whose reflection in the clear blue water looked like a photograph. And we rafted the icy glacial waters - much of which I ingested - of the aptly-named Kicking Horse River.

We cruised to Alaska and experienced its awe-inspiring beauty - like Colorado on steroids. We took a seaplane to a remote lodge across a very broad river from a glacier, and ate delicious salmon grilled over alderwood. The ice in our drinks was chipped from the glacier. We visited a dogsled camp, where we were pulled on a wheeled sled up a fire road by a team of dogs, and our daughter got to cuddle the puppies. Our ship docked the last night outside of Vancouver's harbor, where we were treated to an international fireworks competition.

We've been to London and Paris, taken the train through the Chunnel between the two, and visited Salisbury Cathedral, Bath, the Cotswolds and Stonehenge. We've seen plays in London's West End. We've seen where the most famous member of my clan - William Wallace - was accused of treason, and where he was hanged. We found a quaint pub in London, and my wife persuaded them to sell us the wine glasses we used. We rode the London Eye, and afterward found a neat little arcade tucked away in a building, complete with a small bowling alley and bumper cars. We walked the streets of Paris, taking in the architecture, and walked through the rows of trees along the Champs Elysee. We also found a great little wine bar in Paris, and an awesome Italian restaurant in London.

We've been to Phoenix, Tucson and Sedona, Arizona. We've been to Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, Memphis, and Nashville. We've been to Atlanta and the North Georgia mountains. We've watched some of the world's premier bike racers compete in the Tour de Georgia and the Tour of California. I took a close-up of Lance Armstrong when he was less than five feet from me. We've been to Yankee Stadium, Comiskey Park, Royals Stadium, Camden Yards, Arrowhead Stadium, Chase Field, and Texas Stadium.

Looking through the pictures, I also realized that I've been blessed to have a beautiful home. And we have a wonderful extended family. Looking through the pictures reminded me how much I miss my Dad, and what a clown he was (which is apparently genetic).

But more than that, I'm blessed to have a lovely daughter - she was cute as a button as a kid, and just got cuter with every passing year. She has so much personality, and it shines through her many expressions. She has grown to be a beautiful young woman, which makes me proud enough to offset the bittersweet pain of seeing my baby girl grow up.

And most of all, I have the joy and privilege of sharing my life with the most beautiful woman with whom God ever graced this earth. She is beautiful, she is funny, she is adventurous, she is sexy. She makes me laugh, she makes me cry, she makes me think, she excites me, she makes me relax, she makes me a better person than I'd otherwise be.

When it's all said and done, if I never travel outside my own community again, I have been richly blessed to have seen so much of the world, so much of God's beauty and bounty, and man's creation.

And I will have done it in the company of the two most beautiful, interesting, entertaining, funny, and adventurous people in the world - my daughter and my wife, with whom I'll have the privilege of sharing the rest of my life, come what may. Who could ask for anything more?