The Journey Home: Making Our Trail

“I don’t want to ever come home.

And I am ready to be home.”

This is the text I sent today to my friend.

It’s about all I have for you guys tonight.

Goodness, it’s hard to come back down to sea level when you’ve been frolicking on the mountain top.

Yesterday and today the sea level problems included miles on the road, the perplexity of figuring out the best way to handle bathroom breaks with young sons in this current culture traveling as the only adult and trying to decide via telephone how to care for a little wound Ryder the dog keeps reopening on his leg.

Ah, but there’s road good times too, of course.  I truly could not ask for better traveling companions.  These kids are seasoned in the car.  They are funny and mostly kind and we love to laugh at the trouble we run into as often as we can.

Because the staff at Lost Valley did a fabulously hilarious parody of Adele’s song “Hello”, that melody has been in our brains since we left.  I don’t listen to regular radio a lot around the house so my entourage here had never heard of Adele.  (Yes.  That’s true.)  Because we had miles to cover and time to pass, we played Adele’s song.  A lot.  Like, we’ve listened to “Hello” approximately once every hour.  I bought these dollar store plastic microphones before the trip and we hold our mics and belt it out, with commentary throughout.  The song is suddenly hysterical if your twelve year old offers voice overs about why this lady should stop calling this former love of hers.  Also.  We all think we sound awesome when we sing very loudly.  (We do not sound awesome when we sing very loudly.)

You know you’ve been on the road a long time when you stop at a gas station and you actually purchase this little plastic cup jammed into a bowl of ice that is full of cantaloupe for $3.  And you think it tastes good.

Sometimes you drive through a city a few hours later than you planned and a friend you made online years ago invites you to crash at her home.  And you do just that.  And you realize as your drive to her house that this will actually be the first time you’ve met in person and life is full of funny risks and sweet surprises and as you eat pizza she and her daughter ordered and enjoy her generous hospitality over blackberry pancakes and bacon the next morning you know you are literally tasting kindness from the hands of God and those types of genuine surprises make life awfully pleasant and fun.

(Who knows – maybe one day you’ll be driving through my town and I’ll invite you to dinner at my house.  Trust me when I say — I won’t invite you if I don’t mean to, so you can feel confident saying yes.  If you want to, of course.)

I fully meant to write more from the road, to complete my reviews as we traveled.  But you know, it’s just not working out entirely that way.

Which is fine.  Really, just fine.

We will eventually be back in our at-home reality and that’ll have to be okay too.  It’ll be good again, I’m sure.  And lovely and full and comfortable and cozy.

It’ll just take a couple hundred more miles before I believe it.