Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Waiting for the Wall

I'm in shotgun position now - Kate has taken over the driving as we agreed. I thought I'd snooze a bit, but things have changed and I feel vindicated now.

Even an hour ago, when it appeared we'd done this silly thing for nothing, Kate didn't seem to be holding it against me. "Hey - it's just money," she said. "Even if the company thinks we're nuts and won't refund the cost of the rental, it's not going to ruin either of us." She had a good point. "Plus you've managed to make this my weirdest trip to California ever... And I've been there a lot."

"Well that's something" was my best response.

But things are suddenly happening. What the radio news originally was saying were 'delays to international flights because of disruptions in Europe,' has evolved. First the chatter on the blogs and usenet groups is that international flights are just outright cancelled, and not just to Europe. The radio has finally caught up with that now, and it's sounding like even short hop flights to Canada have been 'delayed' so they say. So we're presumably on the front edge of a bunch of Canadians trying to get home.

So we're expecting this cruise to come up against a wall shortly. We're not sure about the borders in general. It might be just aviation - man I hope that the border isn't just generally closed. That would mean something really big is going on. There's billions in cross border business that relies on open borders... plus I'd hate to be stuck in Port Erie indefinitely. That would be nuts.

I'm really digging this G3 card that lets me type while we drive. I see the link drops occasionally, but it's not too bad. We're just getting out of Flint, Michigan now. It's only about another hour to the border or less I think.

"What are you typing?" Kate asked a few minutes ago.

"My last words before our abduction," I answered.

"Great, do I get a say, or are you speaking for both of us? And are you hoping the aliens leave your laptop behind? Maybe they are robots and will abduct your laptop and discard you as a worthless hunk of protoplasm."

I laughed at that, and answered "I'm not sure whether I should be insulted that you called me worthless protoplasm, or excited that you called me a hunk."

"Ha," she laughed "So where is this going." - Uh, oh. Red alert. I don't want to have to skim back through all my postings and strip out any comments on Kate.

"Oh, it gets posted to a personal blog. So people don't see it, but I can refer back to it for future reference... but I'll probably forget about it and delete it."

"Oh yeah. Well - are you ready for me to dictate my last words to the world?"

"Yeah sure shoot." And she rattled on flamboyant, random philosophical thoughts. They were pretty funny. After she said about 300 words I just typed about 4 characters and said. "Okay, got it."

We had a good laugh. But one of the things in there was interesting - she said something about "... as we cruise across the landscape of planet earth, I and my favourite hunk send this message out to future anthropologists that blah blah blah..."

The 'favourite' part was kind of neat to hear, even if it was followed by the hunk joke again.

Kate looks great driving. She seems comfortable there in control of the wheel, hammer down and casually shoulder checking and blowing the doors off the crappy American cars that populate the highways around here. We're in a Grand Am. More junk, but at least we fit in on the roads. I guess we're in domestic car country.

When we were going slow out of Kalamazoo, we turned off the AC and dropped the windows to let some coolish summer morning air in and it blew Kate's hair around. She said something about "Great - my bad hair day is going to be even worse." and brushed long strands of sun-illuminated, browny-blonde hair out of her eyes. She looked pretty hot. I'm feeling rather comfortable with her - long car trips seem to either do that or make you despise each other. Some sort of lens for personality that focusses it so that it either burns a hole in your forehead, or warms you both up.

Yikes I better make sure she doesn't see the URL for this site, or it could be mucho embarrasing.

We'll see what the next hour brings for us. Somewhere, probably a wall.

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