Good and Ick

Cleveland. Six hours short of goal.

The cross-country road trip has been both good and bad. We had intended to find campsites and throw up the tent and giggle under the stars, but our first night found us in terrain in which signs exhorted us to check for rattlesnakes and scorpions. Scorpions! Scorpions are funny in comics, but loathsome in any other setting. And they are bugs. They crawl into shit just because they can. Neither of us was happy about the rattlesnake thing, either, but a snake would just as soon avoid something as big as a person; who knows what scorpions would do?

So we pushed on until after dark on the road, and traveled from Ripon, California to Green River, Wyoming, and took a hotel room.

From Green River we made it to Des Moines, Iowa, to spend an all-too-brief visit with Cheryl, Poetry Editor for the Piker Press. (it felt like coming home, but that's a subject for a future post)

Today we basically halved our journey output, due to @#!!#&! (please add your very worst epithets to that symbolic array) construction delays, and thus are brain-fried and ready to rest for a night.

The bad is that we are delayed for a day in reaching our destination.

The good is that these days have allowed us to talk at length about what things need to be done, what things can be done, and what things we actually expect will be done. Had we flown back east, we would have gone from anxiety to panic to turmoil; driving allowed us to go from anxiety to wonder to irritation to wonder to deep discussion to wonder to hating roadwork to wonder to more discussion to ... acceptance of the hard choices we are going to have to make.