Homecoming

Here’s the quick quick summary of the past three days…

We left Ann Arbor at 8am on Thursday. Guy and Megan did most of the driving that day, with me pulling a shift at the end of the day. I prefer to drive usually, but this trip isn’t for me. We spent the night at a Super 8 hotel in Oklahoma. We had a little excitement that night in the form of an over-hydrated husky. Megan cleaned up after Dakota purged the extra water and we tried to get a few hours sleep in between cat yowlings.

We were up at 5:30 the next morning and, after a quick refresher course in driving a stick, we were on the road a little after 6am with Guy and I at the wheels. We drove over 1100 miles this day, across the remainder of Oklahoma, the panhandle of Texas, all of New Mexico and most of Arizona. The night was spent in a Motel 6 in Kingsman, AZ. As the weather was so nice and we were in need of sleep, the cats were banished to the car for the night. So was Fargo, the rat terrier, who kept barking every time someone walked past the hotel room.

Up again at 5:30, on the road again at 6am or so with me and Megan at the wheels. Guy was manning the GPS. We got to see the sun rise over the Mojave, then reached the rather unintersting Central Valley. Intermittently we passed through some rain.

By 3pm we were at the new house in Palo Alto and greeted by a big squishy patch of carpet as we discovered that the roof leaks in one room. Thankfully the landlords live nearby, are very capable and are good people. One of them was over within an hour and the roof problem started getting handled.

Around 5pm Guy took me back to my car, parked at the Oakland airport. I was very glad to see it but less glad to see that I’d left a map light on for a week and the battery was dead. Honestly, I almost cried. Thankfully the airport has people on staff to handle this sort of thing. Three minutes after I reported my dead battery a helpful gentleman pulled up and made it all better.

I hadn’t thought I was very tired until I started driving home. In reality I was completely brain dead and didn’t even recognize the familiar landmarks on my drive home; I just kept driving in the correct direction because that’s what I’d been doing for the past 2600 miles.. I picked up some Chinese take-out on my way home and spent a very short evening eating dinner, having a passable viognier and watching an episode of Veronica Mars. Moira hasn’t let me leave her sight since I entered the apartment. We went to bed before 9pm.

Twelve hours later I finally woke up. After a pot of coffee and the first shower since Tuesday I started to feel almost human. I love my friends and I’m glad I was able to help them, but I gotta admit that I’m completely thrashed right now. My plans for the day are to stay on my couch with Moira (who, by the way, is thrilled with the idea) and catch up with my Netflix. Tomorrow it’s back to work and the daily grind. Oddly enough, I’m looking forward to it.