The final stretch

Day 40 24 July Sunday Lamoille, NV to Grand Junction, CO

Once again it’s time to pack up the van and hit the open road. I’m a little bit sad as I have no idea when I’ll be able to make it back to my hometown, but we’ve got to get back to Ann Arbor and get moved into the new house. We start early in the morning as we’re meeting a good friend from Okinawa and his kids at a park in Salt Lake City for lunch. We haven’t seen him for two years and I’m honestly curious to see if it’ll be awkward at all. It isn’t, it’s fun to see him and the kids have a great time running around the park. It’s a nice, sunny day which also means it’s hot but we’re able to find sufficient shade and let the kids get some needed exercise given that they’ll be sitting in the car for the rest of the day. We then drive down to Grand Junction and check into the hotel. I take Logan to the pool and we have a nice time, despite the presence of a large group of teenagers. However this particular group of teenagers are so quiet and well-behaved I assume they’re part of a church group. This is until a couple of them start loudly pontificating about why the troubles at OSU are all Pryor’s fault and that Tressel was a scapegoat, it’s not just the fact that they’re Buckeye fans that makes me think they’re satan-worshippers it’s the language they’re using to “discuss” the situation. I speak up, if only to remind them a little kids around, and ask them where they’re from. The group says they’re from all over and are a group of cop’s kids on a summer camp. Which explains the lack of things on fire and chairs in the pool.

Day 41 25 July Grand Junction to Colorado Springs, CO

We get rolling and do the gorgeous drive through Colorado on I-70, I suspect that I bore the hell out of Megan on the drive as I tell her all kinds of stories from last summer’s MTrek and my Academy years, but I have a good time on memory lane. The drive goes quickly and I enjoy driving through the great state of Colorado until…….we hit late afternoon C-Springs traffic on I-25 and it takes about an hour to get from Castle Rock to the Springs. Why I-25 hasn’t been expanded to 3 lanes the entire way between Denver and the Springs is a mystery as the traffic on that stretch has gotten even worse since I was a cadet and it was a parking lot back then. We finally pull into my sponsor’s house and I get to enjoy the company of two of the greatest people to grace planet Earth. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Sponsor families are people who are willing to open up their homes and their lives to cadets at the Air Force Academy and be a sort of second family to cadets at the academy. For a lot of people the relationship never takes off for one reason or another, for me I basically really did pick up a second family and I am forever grateful for that, they made my life as a cadet and a real, live person so much better. One somewhat funny thing about the decor is the fact that the picture my sponsors have of me is one in which my sponsor brother(cadet who shares the same sponsors) and I are completely trashed. I take some small comfort in the fact that the photo makes me look sober while my sponsor brother looks five sheets to the wind, so at least Logan won’t say “Daddy, what’s wrong with you?” when he sees it.

My Sponsors live up on a hill in Western C-Springs and they have an amazing view of Pike’s Peak and the Front Range of the Rockies. I take a walk with my sponsor Dad and Logan around the neighborhood and soak in the mountain air. One the way back to the house we see a Doe and I get to enjoy a moment of pointing out the deer to Logan.

Day 42 26 July Colorado Springs, CO

Finalizing a mortgage when you’re on the road is not fun. If anyone tells you it is, they are out of their minds. I spend far more of the day than I would like printing stuff out and Megan has to run over to a Kinko’s to fax it in to the mortgage company office. Luckily my sponsors know of a house in the neighborhood that has a pool and they’ve made friends with the family so they are able to call and ask if we can bring the kids over to go swimming. The answer(Thank God!) is yes and so I head over with the kids and my sponsor parents while Megan makes a fax machine run. There’s already another family at the house and the pool is filled with kids which is really nice. Logan has a ball and then discovers how much fun the slide is and goes down it at least twenty times, luckily Elizabeth is napping in my arms and my sponsor dad gets the duty of getting Logan when he comes down the slide and dragging him through the water to the stairs. Logan can swim, but he does it kind of slowly. It’s a fun afternoon and I’m a little sad when it comes to an end. We have a nice night, with a fun dinner with some more friends from Okinawa(who I really hope decide to sponsor Cadets, their house is amazing and they’re the kind of busy, bustling family a homesick kid would love to be around) and then some wonderful conversation when we get back to my sponsors. Five a.m. comes too quickly.

Day 43 27 July Colorado Springs, Co to Kansas City, MO

As I said five a.m. comes too quickly, but Megan and I haul ourselves out of bed and start getting the van ready for a long day on the road. It’s about eleven hours of driving to get from C-Springs to Kansas City and we want to get in in time to enjoy seeing my Aunt and Uncle and my cousins. So we head off across Eastern Colorado and Kansas and Hoo Boy is it boring, I thought North Dakota was bad. Kansas is worse, North Dakota at least had the giant Cow. We have two notable “incidents” the first is when Logan informs us he has to go to the potty and we pull off to a remotely run gas station that has “bathrooms”. The station is closed and yet someone decided that locking the bathroom doors would be too easy and so I’m treated to a sight that I won’t soon forget. I take Logan behind the building and instruct him to water the weeds growing through the pavement. The next incident is a massive traffic slowdown that we run into just outside of Kansas City. The best part is that this is caused because the highway patrol had to shut down a section of highway because the pulled over an RV and the guy holed himself up in it and threatened to commit suicide. Don’t get me wrong as I was depressed at the thought of driving through Kansas as well, but I did think this guys response was a little extreme. We finally get to my cousin’s house and see the whole clan. My Aunt and Uncle have flown out from Santa Fe and it’s a true pleasure to see them as well as seeing the cousins. It’s great to be around family as my cousin’s fiancée comes and immediately insists she take the dogs for a walk and I have ton of help unloading the van. My Cousin has cooked up a great Mexican meal and we enjoy a great evening with some of the people I love best. At the end of the night Logan entertains everyone by pretending to have a phone conversation with my cousin’s son over the baby monitor. It’s hilarious and he clearly enjoys the attention.

Day 44 28 July Kansas City, MO to Ann Arbor, MI

We spend most of the day with my family in Kansas City and again spend more of it than I would like on paperwork. It’s part of the reason we’ve decided to drive throughout the night to get into Ann Arbor by Friday in case anything else comes up with the paperwork. This way we can at least stop by the office and after driving through the night our zombified appearance ought to scare the guys at the mortgage company into being more helpful.

The day in Kansas City is pleasant, we have a fun time walking through the Hallmark company tourist center and the ribbon making machine is really cool, it makes a ribbon for you while you wait and I can’t help but think that this is the type of thing I would spend FAR too much time at if I was drunk. For lunch/dinner we order barbecue from a classic Kansas City barbecue joint and it is fabulous, I only wish I remembered the name. We enjoy some time to hang out and conversation before hitting the road at eight o’clock at night. My Aunt and Uncle and my Cousins are awesome and it's a real pity that we have to leave, but the road is calling. Driving through the night actually has some advantages, the kids and the dogs sleep the entire time and therefore we don’t have to stop every couple hours to take care of bathroom, bottles, food, etc. We can just go. The problem is that driving through the night for long hours is a tough experience because the dark presses in around you and you can’t see anything outside of your little world, it’s hard to contextualize distance when your whole world doesn’t extend beyond your headlights and what they reveal about the road. In this respect flying at night and driving at night aren’t very different and if you want to know what an airline pilot is going through on a night flight stay awake and pay attention to everything that’s going on when in the car late at night, the catch is you don’t drive(the autopilot does that) and you have to imagine the lights being both above and below you and after a while let your eyes close enough that everything blurs and you're not entirely sure where the horizon is, then turn off the radio and find something with static only with bursts of semi-intelligible chatter. The catch is if you drift a little bit while flying, no big deal until it's landing time and that's only a few minutes of concentrated effort, drifitng while driving has .......... bigger consequences. We get into Ann Arbor on Friday morning and thankfully Megan talked the people at the hotel into letting us check in early. We spend the rest of the day in a kind of strange, tired haze and wonder why the mortgage company doesn’t need us for anything, but at least we’re in Ann Arbor and the trip is over! 44 days on the road, 16 states, and thousands of miles later we have pulled it off. Kids and Dogs are still alive and Megan and I are still married. Yeah, we’re awesome.

The rest of the story………
So we get to Ann Arbor and spend the weekend cooling our heels until we can close on the house on Monday 1 August. We have to check the dogs into a pet hotel as the dogs have had enough time with each other and get really aggressive on a drive into Ann Arbor, it scares Elizabeth badly and we even look up animal shelters. Luckily, the pet hotel has a vacancy and we’re able to keep the dogs. This is a good thing as Megan and I both were arguing to keep different dogs.

We’re not able to close on the house on 1 August, something we at least find out about on 31 July. As a result we decide to check into the Splash Universe hotel located in Dundee, MI http://www.splashuniverse.com/Dundee/index.htm just off highway 23 by the giant Cabela’s. This is both because we’re tired of the Motel 6 and because we figure Logan could really use a larger area to run around in and have a good time in a waterpark. The place is a lot of fun and perfectly sized for a kid Logan’s age, Logan has a ball and I have fun too, although the constant 80’s hair band music playing in the background makes me think of the Napoleon hanging out at Waterloo scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. For my young business school friends Bill & Ted’s Excellent adventure was an 80’s movie that is really good, you see it stars Keanu Reeves and he….aw fuck it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Ted%27s_Excellent_Adventure . Tuesday, 2 August comes and we’re finally able to close on the house and start getting moved in. It’s a fun new adventure, but I’m starting to feel like the title character in Brewster’s Millions, I’m going to be so sick of spending money at the end of this I’m never going to want to buy anything again, now I know why Dad’s everywhere are such tightwads. Still, I really like the house, the neighborhood is awesome and we’re getting settled in to a great new life in a great new house. Looking forward to sharing this with anyone who manages to make it back my way.

So for now this is it, I hope you all have enjoyed reading this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. If there’s enough funny stuff from the Seattle trip I’ll write that up as well, but that’s still to be seen. Take care all.