#and my roommate replaced the showerhead while i was gone.

[precise-desolation]

Finally home!

[[Hello! Well. I finally made it back from fieldwork. I got in at probably 7:30~8pm last night. Oh my god, that trip….

So usually that drive takes about 8 hours. Almost always, under very nearly any conditions, it takes between 7.5~8.5 hours, no matter the road conditions or how many people and dogs you have packed into the car. I know this because I have made that drive with my family probably over 80 times in my life, though this was only the fourth time I’ve made it alone. I have literally never, in all of that time, had it take more than 16 hours, and that was only because we were coming from the coast rather than inland and North Carolina is a very long state.

I was on the road, from the time I left my grandmother’s house to the time I got home, for about 29 hours. Now, I mean, part of that was the fact that I had planned to spend a day or two in the Raleigh-Duram area, but I got to Chapel Hill and went, “Fuck it, I can’t do this anymore, I’m going home.” So I wandered around Chapel Hill for a bit before committing to the idea that I was going to skip all the university libraries I had planned to go to.

So it was 3pm when I left my grandmother’s house, 4:30 when I got to Chapel Hill, 6 when I finally just said “fuck it” after realizing I had no idea where I was going to stay for the night, then drove for about half an hour before realizing my low tire pressure indicator was on. Which wasn’t much of a problem, it happens all the damn time because for some reason my tires object to holding air. So much so that for my birthday my parents got me a little air compressor that runs off the AC adapter in the car. It works great.

But the thing was, I had already driven about 2,500 miles over the course of my trip. I did not want to be on the road, especially not for another 500 miles. So I sat around in the rest area parking lot for like two hours before convincing myself to keep going. About midnight, which was when I finally hit the NC/VA state line, I got to where I knew I probably wasn’t safe to be on the road. So I stopped at the VA welcome center rest area, laid back my driver’s seat, and curled up to go to sleep. Which took like an hour, because I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to sleep in the driver’s seat of a car, but I am 5'7" with neck problems, this didn’t work well. Got about 3.5 hours of sleep, though, and got back on the road about 4:30am.

I stopped for gas at 5:30 and got a cold coffee thing, which I didn’t realize was expired until I had taken a drink of it and it tasted off… Drove until about 6:30, when I again found myself too tired to be on the road. So I stopped at a travel plaza in WV, attempted to sleep until about 8:30, when the sun started to make it unbearably hot in my car. At which point I went inside, got a green tea frappuchino thingy because I detest coffee but needed caffeine. Sat in there until I finished that and was debating lunch because it was like noon. But I didn’t feel well because of little sleep in an uncomfortable position, so I was exhausted and in pain.

So I finally got back on the road at like 12:30pm. And let me tell you, WV is the state that never ends. I was fucking texting my roommate the Lambchop song about how it was the state that never ends. I stopped for lunch at about 3, when I finally got hungry, then got back on the road about 4. At which point I just wanted out of the car. I made one more stop for gas at like 5:00, a little while after I made it back to Ohio. At which point my back was yelling at me, but I was an hour and a half from home. So I pushed through that and got home about 7:45-ish.

By the time I got back, I was about 10 miles shy of having driven 3,000 miles during the course of this trip. I was gone for 7 weeks. And I left 3 days after we got keys for the place we’re buying. And if I haven’t told that story here, feel free to ask, but be advised that there will be ranting. So now the project this week is to get unpacked and moved in before I go back to work.