Today Linda and I begin the final week of our 31-day odyssey. One week from right now, she'll be finishing her first dialysis back in her home unit at Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown. Right now she's getting dialysis in Oklahoma City, the eighth of ten centers we're visiting on the road. Her final two treatments--in Memphis and Cincinnati--will both start very early in the morning, around 5:30am. Won't that be fun!
It has been a long trip, and I'll admit that we're starting to feel it. The last two days were long ones on the road, as we covered 900 miles between Williams, Arizona, and Oklahoma City. We did take the time for a one-hour detour on Sunday to drive through Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert, the last parks we'll visit. That was far from the last of the great scenery; all the way across New Mexico on I-40, we saw red rocks, mountains, verdant hillsides, and desert flora. I know that the most scenic parts of New Mexico are not on I-40, but it more than sufficed for our Sunday drive.
Yesterday we began in Santa Rosa, NM, and soon enough were in Texas, crossing the panhandle with a stop for lunch in Amarillo before finishing up in Oklahoma. The theme for the day was wind, a strong, not crosswind for the past day and a half, blowing south to north at 20-30mph. The trees along the highway were bent against it, and by the end of the day my hands were sore from gripping the steering wheel more tightly to guard against gusts. A few times we drove through clouds of dust, and though we were hardly the Joad family in our air-conditioned Toyota, we could get a feel for what it must have been like in the 1930s "Dust Bowl" as unrelenting wind blew the dusty earth every which way, scattering citizens along the way. This is not a place where we could live, we agreed. The people are friendly enough, but the flat land and steady winds don't capture us the way the colorful geology of the southwest did.
So the mission for the last two days was to make the 900-mile trek and give us a chance to relax today. The only thing on our schedule today is dinner with two cousins I've never met--the daughter and granddaughter of the cousin I've never met either. Friday is our day to meet my first cousin Valerie, and by then we'll be old friends of the family, or the side of the family that was missing from my life for about 30 years. Does it count as a reunion if you've never met? Whatever you call it, we're looking forward to the dinner before continuing our eastward, home-bound journey.
How tired are we after more than three weeks on the road and no home cooking in two weeks? The other night, after checking into a motel in Santa Rosa, we wanted to do some laundry. We took the clothes and detergent over to the laundry room and loaded everything up. I put seven quarters in the washer and headed back to the room while Linda played with the clothes. We gave the washer a half-hour, and then I went back there to move everything over to the dryer. But no. Linda had forgotten to push in the coin slot, so the washer never started. I started it, gave it a half-hour, and went back to put everything in the dryer. So far, so good. I even put the seven quarters in the dryer's slot before returning to the room to wait it out. But I couldn't get the dryer to start. I pounded the buttons again and again, but nothing. So I hied myself to the motel office to break the news that their dryer wouldn't start. The clerk was very helpful, promising to get the maintenance man to unlock the motel's private laundry room so I could dry our clothes.
About the time I got back to our room, I remembered. . .yeah, I forgot to push the damn coin slot in. It worked like a charm once I made yet another march over there and pushed the coins in. The dryer started, and I raced back in time to see the maintenance man unlocking a door. I apologized for disturbing his evening rest, but I was laughing by the time I got back to our room. "It's a beautiful thing," I told Linda, "to have a marriage between equals." Yes, equally brain-dead after all those days spent wandering the infinitely fascinating but very hot (100+ degrees on three different days) southwest. Now we're looking forward to the fall color and the football weather which will no doubt greet us on our return to central New York.
We still have plenty to do on the road, including Linda's birthday on Thursday, various cousins, a weekend with our friends Jan and Judy Finkel in western Maryland, and a final stop next Monday on the way home to visit more friends near Harrisburg, PA. If the saying is true that you can have too much of a good thing, then we'll just have to take our chances this final week. We're just about full to the brim and have had a fantastic time, but physically it's starting to catch up to us. But at least we don't have to do any more laundry.
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