Hello. It’s me!!

It’s important to look back, to gain perspective on what has been accomplished.

Our cannonball trip from Arizona to a handful of miles shy of Canada began last Friday. This is what I gave up.

This is what I acquired.

And this …

Dust devils. Yup, we spent a half-hour dodging Satan’s spinners so that we could crawl along at five miles per hour through Pasadena.

Eventually, we turned north … through the mountains outside of Los Angeles.

And then, we encountered three hundred consecutive miles that looked something like this.

Allow me to tell you a story. We don’t have any pictures to back up our claims … primarily because the pictures would terrify you. We stopped at what appeared to be a nearly vacant Best Western outside of Bakersfield. Dog friendly. 2.5 stars. What could possibly go wrong?

No room at the Inn.

Again, there had to be three cars in the parking lot. It’s hard to imagine where all the phantom residents were.

The proprietor told us to visit a Days Inn about twenty-three miles up the road. Fine. We’ll take an establishment that wants us.

#Mistake.

It took Dad a half-hour to figure out how to open the door to room 105, a process that included vigorous training from the staff at the hotel. That turned out to be a good thing, because it was thirty minutes that we didn’t have to spend in the room.

I saw a bug running across the floor. I don’t want to hazard a guess as to the genotype or phenotype of the creepy crawler, but I ate it as soon as I could. Eight hours later, I saw the bug again, following a healthy regurgitation of the insect. It’s completely normal to throw up hotel insects at 4:18am, in case you were wondering.

It’s not normal for sticky substances to populate stained hotel carpeting.

It’s not normal for a shower head to be positioned fifty-four inches above the floor.

It’s not normal for the hot water and cold water to be reversed.

The following morning, Mom and Dad were able to get ready to go and pack the room in about eight minutes. We eschewed the generous hotel-supplied continental breakfast and hit the road. I was exhausted.

So tired, in fact, that I needed to occupy the space below Mom’s feet.

As you can clearly see, this left no space for Mom’s feet … for the remaining 1,000 miles.

Dad thought we should interrupt a two-hundred-and-seventy minute stretch of unending travel with a break at Mt. Shasta. Fortunately, the sidewalk was peppered with scientific minutia.

Wait … are you telling me that Mt. Shasta could blow? I am OUTTA here!

But Mom forced me to remain for another moment … begging me for an “appropriate” picture before fear thoroughly consumed me.

I asked Dad to get us out of path of a potentially warm, comforting lahar bath as soon as possible. Nobody needs a slurry of pyroclastic material to engulf their recreational vehicle, if you know what I mean.

We blew through Oregon.

And my Mom kept her feet on the dashboard as we entered Washington.

We avoided Dust Devils, Lahar Baths, and a rogue Days Inn … eventually arriving at the ferry terminal.

My job was to prevent open flames during our ferry ride.

And that’s the story of how we arrived at home. We left Phoenix at 11:20am on Friday morning … we arrived just shy of the Canadian Border at dinner time on Sunday night. That’s fifteen hundred miles of thunder, pups.

When I got home, I walked into the house, strolled into the dining room, and piddled on Mom’s dining room carpet … it was my way of demonstrating that this was/is MY house. I also pottied in the house at bedtime … ending eighteen consecutive days of flawless urinary behavior. I’m blaming my bad behavior on the insect at the Days Inn.