Packing It In

Okay, everything is packed, I think. Doors and windows are secure. Trash is dumped, dishes washed, and the place as set as I can think of making it to be unoccupied for a month. Guess it's time to go. I'm 30 minutes behind my most recent schedule, buy maybe I can still get clear of the Bay Area before the worst of the traffic hits. On to Yreka!

Yreka!

I had projected my drive north today to start at 1 PM and hoped for Noon, but some stuff came up at work and I didn't actually pull out from the apartment until 1:45. As I feared, the Friday getaway was already well under way by then. You really need to leave by Noon on a Friday or you'll get stuck, and that's what happened to me.

( Messy details )

My original plan was to get to Yreka at 8:30. I pulled into the parking lot just before 10:30, having driven 401.7 miles in 8:45 including stops, an average of 45 miles per hour. As it happens, that turns out to be almost exactly the same average speed that MapPoint used when calculating what should have been a 333.3 miles trip starting at 1 PM.

The lot was crowded, and there were four people ahead of me at the front desk, even at 10:30 PM. Fortunately, my prepaid reservation was waiting for me. (The fact that the reservation was prepaid was why I didn't bail out and stop sooner, incidentally.) I hauled my stuff up to the room and in a few minutes I will prepare dinner, and soon after that, try to sleep, although now I'm all wired up with the liters of caffeine I consumed, and from the semi-white-knuckle driving.

Fortunately, check-out time tomorrow isn't until Noon, the included breakfast is open until 10 AM on weekends, and I'm not in nearly so much of a hurry. The plan calls for me to leave at 10 AM, but Lisa told me to not rush and not worry, so I'm going to do just that.

But Speaking of Worry...

After the misadventure with the pickup truck in Tempe, Lisa mentioned that maybe we would have been better off with the original plan, which was for her to drive the Vanagon to the Bay Area and for us to drive together in my van to Tempe. (This plan was abandoned so I could use the vacation days saved by my flying to Arizona for the Worldcon trip instead.)

( Well, maybe it wouldn't have gone that well after all )

Why do these things always happen on the road trips? Still, there's a GM dealership in Stayton, so I can probably have the van looked over and they can tell me what's wrong while I'm in Mehama. Fingers crossed that this isn't a serious (read: expensive) problem.

On the one hand, if this had turned up a couple of weeks ago, I could have had my regular mechanic look at it. On the other hand, for the past two weeks, I've been too busy to do anything of that sort.