3 days till the wedding! And my last day of work for almost a month. I can’t wait for the road trip! We got a GPS and a car inverter (converts the car power outlet to house outlets) as some of our gifts, and since they were delivered to his parents’ house (his parents, unlike my family and the wedding, are local), we went ahead and found them so we can have them on our honeymoon. We haven’t tried out the inverter (thanks Mike!) yet, but the GPS is just what I hoped it would be when I registered for it (thank you Vogels!). It has a bicycle mode, so we can take it with us when we go out on our bikes, too. And it’ll allow us to find Gold’s Gyms, for which we have travel passes, and service stations in the desert, and the diners listed in the four or five books we’ve been given, and yarn stores (I hope), and other interesting things.
I will try and update this site every day or two or three, and hopefully I’ll remember to give out the address to friends and family, since I think I haven’t really done that much since it was only going to be a cycling blog….
Accuweather says it’ll be a beautiful day this Saturday, with a high of 74°F and mostly sunny (some clouds and a tiny chance of a short storm). Hopefully it won’t be humid like it’s been this past week, where you get into bed after having a fan pulling air in through the bedroom windows and discover the sheets are damp — and by damp I mean actually wet, not just a little sticky. Ugh. I worry about my guitar…I may ask C’s mom if I can bring it over to their house as they usually have the a/c on. And they have central air, unlike our dinky college apartment, where the window unit makes a small part of the apartment very cold and leaves the rest like nothing’s happening, all the while sucking electricity like…
Um…
I’m terrible at metaphors — I’m too literally-minded. “Like an out-of-shape runner gasping for air” is the best I can think of. It uses a lot of electricity. Double the bill for a few days of a/c — seriously, it’s that bad. We have four computers, but the a/c doubles the bill when used only for a few days?
The desert will be a relief after the last week of swimming through the air. I visited my aunt and uncle in Arizona years ago, and one day we went shopping downtown. It was gorgeous out, a little warm but with a nice breeze going by every so often, but after a while of wandering about outside, my aunt started to try and steer me into the shade before I made myself sick. I was surprised — “are you kidding me, it’s like 80 degrees out” — and she said “It’s a hundred and ten, get in the shade!” (In my defense, I had never experienced desert before.)
I wonder how many Midwesterners get heat- or sunstroke when they go to Arizona for the first time? “Let’s go for a walk, it’s beautiful! Man, I thought it was supposed to be hot here!” *walks about in the sun, falls over*
On that same note, we’re having the power steering leak in the van fixed before we go through the desert on the old Route 66, where service stations can be 100 miles apart. I’d rather spend the money now to get it fixed (with the shop aware that we’ll be traveling through the desert) than attempt to ride as much as 50 miles on a bicycle in the desert, especially considering that, in 75 degrees here in the green Midwest, the best I can do is about 25 miles. But if we do break down close enough to a service station, it’ll be nice to be able to ride for help if necessary. (Gotta put water bottles on the to-pack list.)
Okok. Back to work.
Nettabird 