I Won't Leave, I Can't Hide, I Cannot Be, Until You're Resting Here With Me
--"Here With Me", Dido
Contemplating my upcoming second visit to Kentucky this May, I've come to the realization that the majority of the trips I go on turn out really damn well in the end. I'm not stuck with bad memories of long stretches of boredom with whomever I might be traveling with at the time. Nor do I have a stockpile of stories of how everything went wrong from the word go when speaking in regards to the dozens of trips I've taken over the years. Maybe it's just because it doesn't really take much to make a vacation successful for me--good food, good company, and some sort of purpose in being even if that purpose is only to take in a baseball game or attend a friend's graduation, as the case may be. Or maybe it's just because I've had great luck when it comes to everything falling my way when it comes time to sally forth from my perch in Southern California.
Indeed, the only horrifying trip I believe I've ever taken was the drive up and down the coast we went on in 1998. That's the only time that I can recall that something might have been off from the very beginning and continued to fester until we pulled back into my driveway. Even then, I still possess some pleasant memories of that trip. Even then, I would hesitate to label it an unmitigated disaster. It remains the one time I fell closest to completely canceling a trip entirely, though.
However, it's not even close in comparison to the trip that on the outside sounds like it was absolutely horrid. That honor goes to a trip I took in February 2003 with my ex at the time, one Miss DeAnn.
For starters, you have to understand, that the two of us while we were dating had the bad luck to have our first long-distance trip get off to a rocky start. Back in 2008 about two months after we started going out we were supposed to have taken a car trip to San Francisco. However, somewhere over the Grapevine my car had decided to overheat and completely leave us stranded on the side of the road. We had to wait for an hour before the tow truck came and two hours before my dad could pick us up from where they had towed the car. And yet, that time still turned out okay. I borrowed my parents' van and the two of us took a shorter weekend excursion up to Santa Barbara, where we spent most of our three days looking out over our balcony which was literally one hundred feet from the ocean and pretty much eating and strolling throughout most of the beach community. In fact, I'd daresay it was a complete rescue of what could have been a disastrous excursion.
Keeping that in mind, there was a precedence for us having somewhat bad luck when it came to going on trips. The intermediate trips between that road trip and the D.C. trip, which turned out to be the last trip I took with DeAnn had all gone smoothly (yes, even counting are planned trip to New Orleans on 9/11/01), yet there was alway the potential there that we could have had a repeat of San Francisco all over again.
My first clue that the timing may have been off was the fact DeAnn's body decided to come down with appendicitis a week before we were supposed to take off. Granted, we only decided to go to D.C. two weeks before the date of departure so it wasn't like a huge gap for something to come up, but it was almost like her body was trying to tell us something was destined to go wrong with the trip. We talked about canceling when she got out of the hospital four days after she went in, three day we were supposed to leave. A lot of her friends and family counseled us against leaving. Most of the people I knew thought it was a bad idea to even still be hanging out with an ex two years after we had broken up, let alone pay for a trip for the two of us, so I wasn't about to disclose that she had gone to the hospital at all. In the end, though, we decided that four days in D.C. was too much of an exciting prospect to pass up.
So, despite her doctors giving her a strict warning that exerting herself so soon after major surgery was a bad idea, we left for D.C. that Friday morning. Everything went smoothly after we landed. DeAnn was a little tired so all we were able to do when we landed was go to dinner in the hotel restaurant. Happily, though, that restaurant turned out to be a Shula's Steakhouse, which please me to no end since we had an awesome steak dinner (ordered off a football, no less) to begin our stay in Washington, D.C. We came back to our hotel room, watched a little TV, and DeAnn soon knocked off within the next ninety minutes. I stayed up for another couple of hours, but turned earlier than usual since I too was tired from the flight and the fifty minute drive to our hotel in the midst of the city proper.
That's probably how I missed the start of what could have completely ruined our trip.
During the night the city received three feet of snow. While we slept the city was slowly being layered in white. What's worse, it just kept on snowing the next day off and on. By the end of Sunday, newscasts were calling it one of the top ten worst snowstorms they had seen in the last hundred years. By the end of the weekend almost eight feet of snow had been dumped onto where we were staying.
When we woke up Saturday, I thought there was still a chance they might have the roads cleared up by the afternoon. Hell, even if they had gotten the buses or trains running, I would have been happy. We had so many places I wanted to show her--Smithsonian, Congress, Washington Monument, Lincoln Monument, Monticello, &c...--that even a few hours delay was enough to make me antsy. We'd already been pressed for time when we thought the weather was going to be good, but missing the morning was like torture for me. It worked out for DeAnn, though, because despite her protests to the contrary, the surgery had knocked her out more than she had let on. When she heard the roads were snowed over and that they probably wouldn't be getting around to plowing it till the afternoon at the earliest, she used it as an excuse to stay in bed sleeping for another few hours. She probably needed the sleep, but all I could think of was how all of that was not what I had carefully planned the week before.
I think the only thing we ended up doing of any interest was go out to dinner at a restaurant a few blocks up the street since the roads were still too dangerous to drive. Aside from that momentary distraction, we stayed in our hotel room and watched TV. Well, I mostly watched cable on TV. DeAnn pretty much drifted in and out of sleep till it was time for dinner and then pretty much the same after we had returned to the hotel room.
Sunday's weather was no better. Fairly soon I realized that we weren't going to be able to do anything at all that was on our list of activites. Fairly soon I realized I had just wasted $400 dollars on a trip to see the inside of a hotel room and on a van that would pretty much drive us from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel back to the airport. We wouldn't be seeing any of the sights. We wouldn't be reliving any of the memories I had made when I had gone to D.C. in sixth grade. We wouldn't be doing anything new and different than what we could have been doing in any hotel back in California.
I should have been pissed. I was annoyed, for sure, but a funny thing happened on the usual path to me losing my temper. It turned out not having to do all that driving and all that touring forced the two of us to spend time together in a way that we hadn't spent time doing since we'd gone out. Rather than me trying to keep her occupied all the time so should we think of how much fun I was and the fun times I could pay for, which was the real reason I wanted to go on the trip, we ended up having a decent time all by our lonesomes in the hotel room. We were relaxed, something that I don't think we would have been if we had attempted to keep up with the hectic schedules we had planned for ourselves at the trip's outset. And I know we avoided a slew of fighting from the simple change in plans of not having to decide what or where we would go first. Yes, we were already broken up, but I have the funny feeling that if that trip had gone on as scheduled we would have been at each other's throats like we had been when we had been seeing each other.
Truth be told, it was nice just laying in bed with her, waiting while she slept. It was nice just taking care of her while her body was recuperating. It was nice just being in the same room with her without having to worry about what the status of our relationship was. In the hotel room we were just two friends trying to make the best of a bad situation and, for the most part, succeeding on sheer will.
By the time the roads had been cleared and the sun was shining again on Monday, we were both talking and joking like we had been on Friday morning when we had flown in. DeAnn, not surprisingly, was doing a lot better--way better than she would have if we had actually tromped around Virginia and Maryland like we had wanted to. Also, it was a point of joking of just how bad of a weekend I could have picked to go flying to the East Coast. Instead of going somewhere, you know, warm for February, I had decided to go to a place already known for snowstorms, blizzards, and just plain mean weather. All of this helped to relieve the disappointment at what the trip could have been. We were joking that this had to go down as possibly the worst trip in human history. To this day, I still think she jokes about it with her family and friends.
But as aforementioned, I don't consider it a disaster. If anything, it goes a long way to proving my theory that any time can be a good time as long you're with the right company. If anything, it only asserts the distinction that I'd much rather take a nap and watch cable with a close friend and confidante than scurry around all over our nation's capital with a stubborn and mean ex-girlfriend... even if, by coincidence, those were one and the same person.
No, I don't consider that trip a disaster.
I call that trip as one of the many good times that I had the privilege and honor to share with her.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Contemplating my upcoming second visit to Kentucky this May, I've come to the realization that the majority of the trips I go on turn out really damn well in the end. I'm not stuck with bad memories of long stretches of boredom with whomever I might be traveling with at the time. Nor do I have a stockpile of stories of how everything went wrong from the word go when speaking in regards to the dozens of trips I've taken over the years. Maybe it's just because it doesn't really take much to make a vacation successful for me--good food, good company, and some sort of purpose in being even if that purpose is only to take in a baseball game or attend a friend's graduation, as the case may be. Or maybe it's just because I've had great luck when it comes to everything falling my way when it comes time to sally forth from my perch in Southern California.Indeed, the only horrifying trip I believe I've ever taken was the drive up and down the coast we went on in 1998. That's the only time that I can recall that something might have been off from the very beginning and continued to fester until we pulled back into my driveway. Even then, I still possess some pleasant memories of that trip. Even then, I would hesitate to label it an unmitigated disaster. It remains the one time I fell closest to completely canceling a trip entirely, though.
However, it's not even close in comparison to the trip that on the outside sounds like it was absolutely horrid. That honor goes to a trip I took in February 2003 with my ex at the time, one Miss DeAnn.
For starters, you have to understand, that the two of us while we were dating had the bad luck to have our first long-distance trip get off to a rocky start. Back in 2008 about two months after we started going out we were supposed to have taken a car trip to San Francisco. However, somewhere over the Grapevine my car had decided to overheat and completely leave us stranded on the side of the road. We had to wait for an hour before the tow truck came and two hours before my dad could pick us up from where they had towed the car. And yet, that time still turned out okay. I borrowed my parents' van and the two of us took a shorter weekend excursion up to Santa Barbara, where we spent most of our three days looking out over our balcony which was literally one hundred feet from the ocean and pretty much eating and strolling throughout most of the beach community. In fact, I'd daresay it was a complete rescue of what could have been a disastrous excursion.
Keeping that in mind, there was a precedence for us having somewhat bad luck when it came to going on trips. The intermediate trips between that road trip and the D.C. trip, which turned out to be the last trip I took with DeAnn had all gone smoothly (yes, even counting are planned trip to New Orleans on 9/11/01), yet there was alway the potential there that we could have had a repeat of San Francisco all over again.
My first clue that the timing may have been off was the fact DeAnn's body decided to come down with appendicitis a week before we were supposed to take off. Granted, we only decided to go to D.C. two weeks before the date of departure so it wasn't like a huge gap for something to come up, but it was almost like her body was trying to tell us something was destined to go wrong with the trip. We talked about canceling when she got out of the hospital four days after she went in, three day we were supposed to leave. A lot of her friends and family counseled us against leaving. Most of the people I knew thought it was a bad idea to even still be hanging out with an ex two years after we had broken up, let alone pay for a trip for the two of us, so I wasn't about to disclose that she had gone to the hospital at all. In the end, though, we decided that four days in D.C. was too much of an exciting prospect to pass up.
So, despite her doctors giving her a strict warning that exerting herself so soon after major surgery was a bad idea, we left for D.C. that Friday morning. Everything went smoothly after we landed. DeAnn was a little tired so all we were able to do when we landed was go to dinner in the hotel restaurant. Happily, though, that restaurant turned out to be a Shula's Steakhouse, which please me to no end since we had an awesome steak dinner (ordered off a football, no less) to begin our stay in Washington, D.C. We came back to our hotel room, watched a little TV, and DeAnn soon knocked off within the next ninety minutes. I stayed up for another couple of hours, but turned earlier than usual since I too was tired from the flight and the fifty minute drive to our hotel in the midst of the city proper.
That's probably how I missed the start of what could have completely ruined our trip.
During the night the city received three feet of snow. While we slept the city was slowly being layered in white. What's worse, it just kept on snowing the next day off and on. By the end of Sunday, newscasts were calling it one of the top ten worst snowstorms they had seen in the last hundred years. By the end of the weekend almost eight feet of snow had been dumped onto where we were staying.
When we woke up Saturday, I thought there was still a chance they might have the roads cleared up by the afternoon. Hell, even if they had gotten the buses or trains running, I would have been happy. We had so many places I wanted to show her--Smithsonian, Congress, Washington Monument, Lincoln Monument, Monticello, &c...--that even a few hours delay was enough to make me antsy. We'd already been pressed for time when we thought the weather was going to be good, but missing the morning was like torture for me. It worked out for DeAnn, though, because despite her protests to the contrary, the surgery had knocked her out more than she had let on. When she heard the roads were snowed over and that they probably wouldn't be getting around to plowing it till the afternoon at the earliest, she used it as an excuse to stay in bed sleeping for another few hours. She probably needed the sleep, but all I could think of was how all of that was not what I had carefully planned the week before.
I think the only thing we ended up doing of any interest was go out to dinner at a restaurant a few blocks up the street since the roads were still too dangerous to drive. Aside from that momentary distraction, we stayed in our hotel room and watched TV. Well, I mostly watched cable on TV. DeAnn pretty much drifted in and out of sleep till it was time for dinner and then pretty much the same after we had returned to the hotel room.
Sunday's weather was no better. Fairly soon I realized that we weren't going to be able to do anything at all that was on our list of activites. Fairly soon I realized I had just wasted $400 dollars on a trip to see the inside of a hotel room and on a van that would pretty much drive us from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel back to the airport. We wouldn't be seeing any of the sights. We wouldn't be reliving any of the memories I had made when I had gone to D.C. in sixth grade. We wouldn't be doing anything new and different than what we could have been doing in any hotel back in California.
I should have been pissed. I was annoyed, for sure, but a funny thing happened on the usual path to me losing my temper. It turned out not having to do all that driving and all that touring forced the two of us to spend time together in a way that we hadn't spent time doing since we'd gone out. Rather than me trying to keep her occupied all the time so should we think of how much fun I was and the fun times I could pay for, which was the real reason I wanted to go on the trip, we ended up having a decent time all by our lonesomes in the hotel room. We were relaxed, something that I don't think we would have been if we had attempted to keep up with the hectic schedules we had planned for ourselves at the trip's outset. And I know we avoided a slew of fighting from the simple change in plans of not having to decide what or where we would go first. Yes, we were already broken up, but I have the funny feeling that if that trip had gone on as scheduled we would have been at each other's throats like we had been when we had been seeing each other.
Truth be told, it was nice just laying in bed with her, waiting while she slept. It was nice just taking care of her while her body was recuperating. It was nice just being in the same room with her without having to worry about what the status of our relationship was. In the hotel room we were just two friends trying to make the best of a bad situation and, for the most part, succeeding on sheer will.
By the time the roads had been cleared and the sun was shining again on Monday, we were both talking and joking like we had been on Friday morning when we had flown in. DeAnn, not surprisingly, was doing a lot better--way better than she would have if we had actually tromped around Virginia and Maryland like we had wanted to. Also, it was a point of joking of just how bad of a weekend I could have picked to go flying to the East Coast. Instead of going somewhere, you know, warm for February, I had decided to go to a place already known for snowstorms, blizzards, and just plain mean weather. All of this helped to relieve the disappointment at what the trip could have been. We were joking that this had to go down as possibly the worst trip in human history. To this day, I still think she jokes about it with her family and friends.
But as aforementioned, I don't consider it a disaster. If anything, it goes a long way to proving my theory that any time can be a good time as long you're with the right company. If anything, it only asserts the distinction that I'd much rather take a nap and watch cable with a close friend and confidante than scurry around all over our nation's capital with a stubborn and mean ex-girlfriend... even if, by coincidence, those were one and the same person.
No, I don't consider that trip a disaster.
I call that trip as one of the many good times that I had the privilege and honor to share with her.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Labels: Companionship, DeAnn, Dido, disappointment, traveling, Washington D.C.
posted by mojo shivers @ 1:26 AM
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