Those of you who read Mike's blarg (and I hope for your sakes that that's everyone) knows the story of the morning of Day Forty. We woke up in Monterey exhausted on pretty much every level. We had been thinking of spending a few days with our dear old roomie in San Francisco, but now driving another hundred miles away from home seemed utterly ridiculous. Not when we were so close. So we showered, dug through the car for our least stinky clothes, and called Robyn. We promised to visit her this summer, after we'd had some time to readjust. Then we were off to breakfast.
We caravaned with Val & Whit and their friends to Whole Foods, planning to buy some pastries for breakfast and some sandwiches to take with us to the aquarium. Through happenstance, we ended up sitting alone in a booth while the rest of the birthday party sat at two tables a bit away. We didn't say much, just munched in the comfortable silence of meals on the road. And I'm not sure how we decided it, but when everyone was done eating and Whitney came over to fetch us, he said "Aquarium?" and we said "Yeah...about that..." And, giddy as the day we got married, we said our goodbyes and hopped back in the Blue Hornet. We could see the aquarium another day. We were going home.
Our giddiness was quickly replaced by the first carsickness of our forty day journey. We weren't in the mood for back-tracking forty miles to a major freeway, so we took small and winding roads to the 101, enjoying the scenery because it was California scenery. And, while being homesick and road-weary didn't make us the most objective of critics, you can't argue with the azure sheen of the Pacific on a clear Sunday afternoon. You just can't. And as we headed back home on the same freeway we'd used to drive away, on Day One of the trip a lifetime ago, I thought about what had made me chortle that first day. Mike had said: "Why would anyone even try and argue that anything's better than California?" I had laughed then, and I laughed again now, because he was right. Nothing that we'd seen, gorgeous and mind-blowingly amazing as our trip had been, nothing we'd seen in all those days of driving came close to being as flat out amazing as our home state.
We listened to "Wagon Wheel" one more time, and we crossed the Long Beach city limit halfway through the last chorus. Yeah, and I cried like a baby.
Final tally: 11,136.2 miles of American road.
Songs: Stevie Wonder's Greatest Hits, Graduation (Kanye West), Incognita (Random Voices), "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show, and the there's-nothing-like-it-in-the-whole-USA click of our key in our lock. Home.
Ask about it: "An inconvenient poop."
Hear us both talking about our trip on Episode 31 of SportsNight, available for download at sportsnight.podomatic.com. Read Mike's journey log at LBPostSports.com. And, of course, his regular blarg is still spittin' out goodies at astoriedyear.blogspot.com. Mike is great.
1 comment:
Hee hee...An Inconvenient Poop. I don't even think I want to ask about it. It seems pretty perfect just how it is.
I've cried over that Long Beach sign more times than once. Home is such a great place to be. I'm glad you made it back there safely! And thanks again for gracing me with a stop on your tour. It really was magnificent to see you both.
Thank you, come again!
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