3000 Miles

We arrived home on Sunday evening, March 3rd, drained physically and emotionally. Last week I'd had my first book signing for Robot Crickets. It was a fun time and a success. My enthusiasm for the future of my writing and my other work items was surging.

(Corrie tagged it to make it accurate.)

The next morning, Sunday the 24th of February, Corrie got the call that her Grandmother June had passed. Viewings and services and burials were planned for the coming week.

We had planned to make an epic drive to Austin to see Grandma June and say goodbye, as the end was coming into view, the very next weekend, the 2nd and 3rd. Common sentiment is that she had waited until all of her kids had become grandparents (her oldest and youngest had each just become grandparents in the last two months).

We left Monday night around 8:30 with me driving a rental car. About 10 hours later, after two gas fill-ups and outside Las Cruces, NM, I got a speeding ticket. We needed to switch drivers, which we did. Switched again after Junction, Texas, when we picked up US HWY 290, and made it to Austin by 6:30 PM Tuesday evening local time, for us, though, it was 4:30, making it there in twenty hours.

Wednesday was the viewing, Thursday the service at a daughter's church, Friday the drive from Austin to Odessa (another six hours in the car), Saturday the burial and then the drive from Odessa to Scottsdale. We'd planned to make a detour through Roswell, which may have been less miles, but would've added some hours. On Saturday, after a draining and emotional week, I decided to skip it, and just head down I-20 to I-10, and on towards El Paso, nearly 300 miles. Corrie did roughly the next 300, getting close to Tuscon, and we switched again, and I finished the last hundred miles into Scottsdale: 2:30 to 12:30 (local time, 1:30 from when we left), making that an 11 hour stretch.

Sunday Corrie drove to Quartzite, and then I drove the rest of the way home (under six hours). 20 + 6 + 11 + 6 = 43.

43 hours in that rental car, ignoring the around-town cruising.

That, and those 3000 miles traveled from Long Beach to Austin to Odessa and back again, form the physical structure of the trip we took, the outline that gets filled in with the memories and emotions of a long week of celebration and mourning. It's the oppressive background.

I've got pictures and anecdotes, as being around Corries extended family will produce moments of both, and I got to be a pallbearer for the first time in my life. We stayed up too late each night as well, which is what happens when your buddies are cooks, but that makes catching up on sleep a fantasy.

I'll be getting to that stuff in the coming days.