So, I had myself a wacky Wednesday adventure today and wanted to share a quickie post about it…

Let me bring you up to speed first.  After two transformative weeks of yoga teacher training in Costa Rica, I’m now back stateside.  My “redeployment” began with a rude welcome “back to reality” via Newark (uuuuugh) Airport on Monday night.  In typical Newark fashion, the terminals were a jumbled mess as multiple flights were cancelled, rescheduled, and people pushed and shoved to get where they were going.  I tried to remain yogi-calm through the chaos, but my bliss-state façade may have cracked once or twice as I tried to sort things out. 😉 The situation was particularly irritating because I’d actually changed my flights to a different schedule in order to try to avoid the very situation unfolding before my eyes – the looming doom of having to spend the night at the airport.  Plus, I was already dog-tired.  Ok, I only have myself to blame for this since the night before, I’d stayed up chatting till nearly 3am with yogi gal pals “Little Sarah,” Missy, and Polly, and was up again at 6am Monday morning before our little posse went to Rosie’s infamously delicious Tica restaurant in Nosara for one last group breakfast.  After some delicioso juevos rancheros, we finished packing, then loaded up for our very bumpy (but beautiful) backroad 2.5 hour drive to Liberia Airport.  (Seriously, 80% of the roads we traveled were donkey cart’esque “roads.”)  I got the airport, paid exit taxes, checked in, went through security, waited around awhile, blah blah blah, had long flight back to the states, dealt with customs, lines, hustling to the other side of the airport, delay, delay, delay, cancellation, etc etc etc, got in more lines, waited, panicked, got wind of a rescheduled flight, scrambled to board….meditated through a bouncy flight…then I finally arrived in DC about 1am Tuesday, cabbed to my friend’s place in DC, settled in, showered, etc, and was in bed sometime around 3am.

Around 7am Tuesday morning I took myself through my own personal practice in order to get centered before the radio interview I had at noon for The Wounded Veteran Program on Fox News 99.1FM Nevada. Then I spent the afternoon catching up on things before Prescott (my rockstar buddy I’m staying with in DC) got home from work and we were out the door for dinner with Bill Chatfield,  Sharlene Wells Hawkes (a former Miss America), and LtCol Shusko (aka: “Joe Marine” and the MCMAP King) and his wife Kadie.  Wow, the stories those men and women had to share!  I was amazed by their adventures and honored to be included in the get-together.  Plus, LtCol Shusko autographed my two copies of his book Tie In’s For Life.

After dinner, Prescott and I were in the mood for ice cream, so we went to a gelato place down the street.  While waiting in line for our yumminess, Prescott chatted up a dude with awesome tats…turns out that awesome dude is photog Drew Xeron, boyfriend of famous DC yogi, Faith Hunter.  Drew told us Faith was waiting in the car and invited us to meet her.  So we did!  And she invited me to be a guest at her yoga class today… which leads me to the adventure… 😉

According to Prescott, as he departed for work this morning he asked me if he should leave the house key for me…apparently, I said no.  But since I have no recollection of this exchange, and know I still had ear plugs in at that point in the morning, that conversation did not take place ;-p  Anyway, after getting a text from Faith that I should come to her noon class today, I had to figure out how to get out of Prescott’s Fort Knox house.  I was locked in with no key.  My only option?  The doggy door.  Yes, the tiny, taped, and saranwrapped-secured doggy door.

Doggy door be damned, I was determined to get to yoga, so around 11:30, I began the exodus.   I took a deep breath, then ripped open the plastic covering of the 1’x2′ door, pushed my yoga mat, purse, and computer through the hole, then (gracefully ;-p) followed with my body.  I wriggled through in a combo Marine low crawl/yogi chataranga move and emerged on the other side thinking, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad.”  But as I stood up and brushed off my hands and knees, I surveyed my surroundings with disappointment.  It appeared I was trapped once more!  I was on a second floor deck/patio area that was fully fenced in on all sides with no way to get out.  As far as I could tell, the drop below was too far to just jump over.  Now what?

I texted Prescott.  He replied: “Go left; jump over railing.  Exit stairs ahead at neighbors.” Really? Just like that?  “Hey Dane, lets go get some chicks.”  “Really?  Just like that?”  So, I walked the perimeter a few times before accepting that scaling a fence (not a railing as per Prescott’s text) was my only option. As I mentally prepared to climb a barrier clearly not meant for climbing, visions of being shot or tazed by pissed off neighbors flashed through my mind.  But it was time to move.  “Welp, let’s do this,” I thought before chucking my purse and yoga mat over, then trying to delicately do the same with my laptop only to see it tumble to the concrete below.  Awesome.  Then, with a wobble and near-miss plummet below, I made it over the fence and scrambled through the next-door neighbors’ property as fast as I could, feeling slightly criminal but trying to be casual.

Thankfully, it was a sunny, mild day here in DC and Faith’s yoga studio was less than a mile away.  I enjoyed the city stroll through Mount Pleasant to Columbia Heights.  When I arrived at Embrace Studio, Faith greeted me with a warm smile.  We chatted briefly and I told her that I was so determined to get to her class that I’d crawled through a doggy door to get there. She got a kick out of that.  Then, I laid my mat down and prepared for practice, glad that I’d done a “down dog” of my own before I got there 😉