{"id":35793,"date":"2016-12-04T06:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-12-04T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=35793"},"modified":"2023-12-16T13:11:35","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T18:11:35","slug":"a-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=35793","title":{"rendered":"A Trip!"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I said on the Diecast last week<\/a>, I’m going on a trip. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing content to hopefully get us through until the end of the year. However, I totally forgot to queue up the next few episodes of World of WarcraftIt actually takes some time to re-post those on this site, because I have to wrangle with the links and formatting tags and give the images captions.<\/span>. So we don’t get to catch up with Norman and Gabstab<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

So instead, let me tell you about the trip I’m taking later this week…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Goal<\/h3>\n

Rachel, my oldest daughter, moved out last spring. She moved all the way to Texas, which is about 1,500 miles (~2,400 kilometers) away. In terms of driving, that’s roughly the same distance as going from London to Moscow. When she moved out, she traveled light. I think she just took one suitcase. Nobody was sure if this move was permanent and so it didn’t make sense to do a big move. But it’s been almost 9 months. She has several jobs and has clearly developed a new life down there.<\/p>\n

So now we want to see our daughter, and we want to give her all of the stuff she left behind. Her remaining belongings are too big to fit on a plane and too expensive to ship. She doesn’t have a driver’s license yet, and even if she did I’d be nervous about a new driver making this huge journey all by herself. (Also, she doesn’t have a vehicle yet.)<\/p>\n

The only solution is for us to drive to Texas ourselves.<\/p>\n

The Problems<\/h3>\n

It’s a long drive. You can do it in two days, but only if you’ve got a couple of energetic adults who are willing to push themselves.<\/p>\n

We don’t have a lot of money at this point in the year. We certainly don’t have enough to pay for hotels all along the way. Heather has many internet-friends between here and there who are willing to put her up for the night, but (sigh) they all have house pets. Which means I can’t go with her<\/a>. Same goes for my daughter Esther, who has similar health problems.<\/p>\n

I suppose Esther and I could just stay home. But Rachel wants to visit with all of us.<\/p>\n

The Solution<\/h3>\n

Everything is bigger in Texas. Except for the hills, which don't exist. This is a picture of Lubbock county, which is somewhere close to where we're going. <\/div>
Everything is bigger in Texas. Except for the hills, which don't exist. This is a picture of Lubbock county, which is somewhere close to where we're going. <\/div><\/p>\n

Heather is going to load up the minivan with all of Rachel’s things and set out a couple of days before I do. She’s going to make the drive with my son Issac, with him navigating. Then Esther and I will fly from Pittsburgh to Dallas. Heather will stop by the airport and pick us up, and then take us the last 5 hours to where Rachel is. The family will stay in a hotel for a few days, and then we’ll do the whole thing in reverse. Heather will drop Esther and I off at the airport and then drive home herself, arriving a couple of days after us.<\/p>\n

If you’ve read the deep parts of the archives on this site, then you know I hate travel. That is, I like being<\/strong> places, but I hate going<\/strong> places. I like the visit itself, but the trip fills me with anxiety.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure why. It’s clearly an irrational fear. The stress I’ve been experiencing for the last week or so is akin to the kind of stress you might feel when suddenly losing a job or having a loved one fall seriously ill. It’s hard for me to think about anything else. Sure, travel is inconvenient, but it’s not that<\/strong> bad, and I have no idea why I’m so neurotic about it.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t help that this is a really complicated trip. We have two groups using two different modes of travel with an arranged pick-up at an inflexible time. That’s a lot of moving parts, and so a lot of ways things can go wrong. Which means I’ve had lots of disaster scenarios to ponder for the last week. Implausible but stressful events leap to mind pretty much the moment I stop thinking about anything else.<\/p>\n

It is really annoying that you can continue to feel an emotion even after you recognize the emotion is irrational \/ inappropriate. I strongly feel like we should be equipped with some sort of “ignore” button for situations like this.<\/p>\n

I don’t even know what we’ll do when we get there. I still won’t be able to visit Rachel where she’s living now, since she lives with pets now. We could take her out to eat as a means of socializing, but that gets expensive. I can’t go to the rodeo, which I assume is the only form of entertainment in Texas. And simply hanging out in the hotel room doesn’t sound very interesting. We’re hoping some sort of cheap (free) passtime presents itself once we get there.<\/p>\n

Now You Know<\/h3>\n

So that’s why I’ve been an angry, stressed-out bundle of nerves for about a week. It probably won’t get any better until I stagger back into the house a week from now.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, THANK YOU to the people supporting me on Patreon<\/a>. If it wasn’t for your help, there’s no way I’d get to see my daughter this year.<\/p>\n

If all goes well, content should<\/em> proceed uninterrupted. The Tuesday column and current Thursday series<\/a> are already written. The other contributors have made some podcast \/ video content, and have plans to make more next weekend while I’m gone. I’ll be keeping up on comments when I get the chance, but I might be a little slower than usual. Try not to burn the place down while I’m gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I said on the Diecast last week, I’m going on a trip. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing content to hopefully get us through until the end of the year. However, I totally forgot to queue up the next few episodes of World of WarcraftIt actually takes some time to re-post those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35793"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56842,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35793\/revisions\/56842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}