- I wake up around 8-ish, take a leak, then head out into the living room part of our hotel suite to update my diary, letting Jen sleep in.
- Jen gets up around 10:30, immediately searching for coffee. The room service folks won’t do breakfast past 10, so we opt against eating here and decide to take showers and get a move on.
- We drive about thirty miles down the road, then stop to gas up and grab some Quizno’s. I pull the box of Trivial Pursuit cards out of the back, just in case the wife feels like playing Alex Trebek, then we get back on the 5 North and drive.
- And drive, and drive, and drive. We drive and listen to the iPod while Jen reads. We barely talk for a couple of hours, just occasionally exchanging warm glances or holding hands. For awhile, I’m the deejay. Then, Jen takes over. I chew gum, she smokes. It takes us hours to get out of California. We only ever stop for gas, Diet Coke, and Iced Tea; then, it’s back on the road. We climb over the Shasta mountains and the hills of Oregon. We see America while listening to “America”. We chit-chat, then fall into long silences. When we get a signal, we talk to Harley and Gail. Later in the day, Jen digs into the Trivial Pursuit questions and quizzes me for hours ’til it’s too dark to see the cards. We succumb to the desire for comfort food and snack out on fries and Chips Ahoy. And before we know it, twelve hours have gone by.
- We pull into Seattle at one a.m. The whole last hour of the trip, I’ve been saying how the car feels like it’s out of alignment or something. As we pull into the garage of the hotel in the heart of the Emerald City, I discover why: we’ve got a pretty bad flat.
- We get the bags into the lobby, check in, and head up to the room. I call AAA to see about getting the tire fixed in the a.m. It’s about a two hour drive from where we are to Vancouver, so I should make it to my noon “Catch” rehearsal with plenty of time, if AAA shows up early enough. Before I fall asleep, I check email and update the diary.