God's Country

July 10^th, 1:16 pm, EDT

I’ve just landed in rural West Virginia at the Lewisburg Airport. The 10-hour trip is behind me and went surprisingly smoothly. After our first flight, my new friend Lisa found an ATM and paid me back the $20 I lent her, and we went our separate ways. The flight into Lewisburg was on the smallest plane I have ever been in. Just a single row of seats on each side of the plane, probably about 14 seats in all. The airport is equally small, just one terminal, and no fancy runways. You walk straight out into the open air and scale the narrow steps of the plane. This feels like a different world, compared to the massive airports and seemingly infinite populous that defined my many trips back and forth from Denver to LA during college.

The landscape is breathtaking. I was talking to the man next to me on the plane as we were landing, and I commented on the endless sea of green below us. He said, “Yep. This is God’s Country.” Indeed.

I estimate I’ve gotten about 6 or 7 hours of sleep in total and feel surprisingly rested. I’m chewing gum, so as not to kill the person who comes to pick me up with the kind of bad breath that only air travel can muster. I called Gesundheit and apparently someone named Melanie is on her way to pick me up after she stops at the train station to pick up others. I wish I could find a working WiFi network to actually post this… I’ve just reset my talking watch to the correct local time. “It’s--one-----thirty-four----P.M.”