Did you turn off the oven?

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

When you're on vacation, you usually only have a few weeks, so you rush out, spend a ton of hours driving somewhere, see some sights, then get back on the road to the next place. It can be a tiring whirlwind but it's the only way you can cover a lot of ground in a limited time.

We've been learning that we enjoy more when we slow down. If we spend a little less time driving, and a little more time in each area, we enjoy ourselves more. We don't see quite as many places, but what we do so, we see well.

If we were retired, and had all our days to ourselves, I bet the perfect way to do this thing, would be to get up early, drive a few hours, setup by noon, spend a few days or weeks or months, then move on. Of course we have to work, so the schedule is blocked up with work hours during the day. We can start early and be done in the early afternoon, then travel, if it's a travel day, or go explore if it's not.

That's why we planned to leave Monday afternoon. That gave us the weekend to get ready and caught up, get my daughter sorted out, and get on the road while it was still daylight. We could have been in Tulalip by dinner time, with even some extra time to go to Walmart if we wanted. It would have been great if things had worked out that way, but well, they didn't.

Scheduling was a big part of the problem, and hours in the day was another part of that. We just had too much left to do on our last day and not enough time to do it all in. There was the doctor and the gym, and Costco, and the vet, and taxes to finish, and email to answer and a trailer to be packed. Even without problems, I knew we were fooling ourselves that we'd get out of the house by 3pm.

Right around the time we'd planned to leave, we realized the air conditioning in the truck wasn't working. The very same air conditioning that had caused us a problem on our last trip in October, the same air conditioning we'd just paid $1100 to have fixed last month. We called the place that had done it and they got us in right away, and surprisingly got it fixed again by 5. While we were aggravated it hadn't all been fixed properly the first time, we were definitely mollified by them getting us in and out so quick. Impressed by their management, not by their mechanic, I guess.

Re-figuring times, I guessed we'd maybe leave by 9pm, but that was about the time I finished filing our taxes. So then I thought 10, but that was the time I finished loading my clothes into the trailer. 11 maybe? That sounded like maybe it was bordering on too late to even go today, right? But rather than have this all play out again tomorrow, we left, nice and early, at 12:30am in the morning on April Fool's Day. Sounds appropriate.

At 2:05am we were across the border headed down the highway to warmer climes. All the stress was gone, and though tired, we were happy to be on our way. I checked my messages to see a missed one from my daughter. My first thought was "Already?" The message read "ANSWER YOUR PHONE! The dryer is on fire!"