Saturday, July 30, 2011

getting there

Friday morning, still tired from staying out too late Thursday night, I went to work like I should, and then, around 11am, was overcome by a serious need to hop in a car and go to visit my brother and his family, even if it was a 14 hour drive. (Yahoo Maps said 12 hrs 57 min. It lies. But I will forgive it, because it may have been the 12 that drew me in.) I called mom, and she was disbelieving, but totally on board if I was really going to leave work and get on the road. My office mate was checking rental car rates and telling me I had to go.

So it was decided.

I did what work I felt couldn't wait for Tuesday, tapping my foot and shaking my fist at the computer when it wouldn't work as fast as I wanted to.  I was outta there by 2pm.

Meanwhile, mom had booked the rental car, and we had both tried to enlist other road-trippers, with no luck. (I did, however, omit to invite my baby sister, totally by accident, which was really really sad, because she says she would have come along. That would have been triple the fun, and I feel bad that I forgot. (Forgive me?))

Somewhere in there I remembered I still hadn't done my laundry, which meant I had no clean undies to pack. Whatever.

I sped home and packed in about 15 minutes, and raced over to pick up mom. More toe-tapping at the rental car place (when I'm ready to go, nobody is fast enough for me), and then a quick detour to park my car in the driveway. (This is when I realized I hadn't packed pajamas and had to run inside for some. I was in and out in a heartbeat. Seriously.)

We hit the road by about 3:30, just in time to run into commuters in the Northern end of the state. (More toe-tapping.)

Mom and I like to stop and stretch when we travel by car, to keep us from getting "car leg". We stopped for dinner in Snowville, where we walked the short distance to the post office to deposit my Netflix I'd meant to send back from the office. (I can be forgetful.)

A couple hours later, we stopped at a rest stop, and gave an old water wheel a spin.
That thing spun for quite a while, once we got it going, which gave us a fit of the giggles, as it tended to spin one way for a while, hesitate, and then spin the other, due to the broken bits.

This rest stop also boasted some serious hand driers that made ripples in our skin, sending us off into laughter again.
We're easily entertained.

Later, we stopped for the night, in Meridian. It was apparently totally un-exciting, as the camera didn't make an appearance at all. We were on the road again by 6am.

Many Rest Stops and gas station fill-ups later, among them a slightly longer stop at a Fruit & Antique shop, the sign of which declared ANTIQUE FRUIT, where we saw these irresistible (but how would we get them home?) set of outdoor chairs:
we arrived in Kirkland and were greeted, a little shyly, by this little angel and her family.

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