On The Road Again

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the question that you're all asking yourselves right about now: "What happened to 'On The Brink Of Homelessness Part Dieux'?" I promise that I'll get back to discussing more trials and tribulations of packing up house in a future post. But due to the pack out, the drive across country (read: completely off-line), and a bought of some sort of nasty flu bug, I'm already light years behind everything that happened over the last week. Just indulge me here folks and think of my out of sequence writings as the artistic dissonance inspired by being back in Louisiana - the land of the not-quite-coherent. "Mon Che're done taught you dat!"

Last Saturday morning Charlotte and I woke up, put Mom and Reese on a plane, said our last goodbyes to San Diego, turned in our cable receiver and then hit the road mid-afternoon, bound for Louisiane. I mention the cable receiver here only because it took the longest of all of the above tasks, and lends a note of finality to our reluctant departure. (Man cannot live without cable, ...or so I'm told). We hadn't planned on a hectic pace. Our goal was to make it a leisurely drive across country making it home on Monday or Tuesday. That still didn't leave time for a lot of diversions and byways, though. We knew that the biggest obstacle after a rapid succession of AZ & NM state lines was the insufferable drive across Texas. Nothing wrong with TX mind you, but you just never seem to make any headway when you're not clearing a state line every 4-6 hours or so, and we probably took the longest possible route - El Paso to Longview - totalling nearly 800 miles across!

When Charlotte & I were stationed in Monterey, we had a friend from Sweden who had seen twice the number of US states than we had (combined). Over 4 cross country drives in the last 11 years, and until this past September, neither of us had ever seen the Grand Canyon, owing to time constraints, blizzards or myriad other misfortunes. The point of this diatribe being that once again, we had to haul ass across the "fly-over" states and didn't really get to dedicate the kind of time we would like to truly seeing America. ...Well, there' always a future PCS somewhere down the road where maybe we'll have the time. But all whining aside, we love being out in America ...and it just keeps getting better every time we see it!