Days Twenty-Nine to Thirty-One: to Hudson, Ohio

Somehow, I imagined more entries like this one back at Mojave.

Maybe that was a lifetime ago. Maybe I just like to complain. Maybe almost seven months pregnant and 99 degrees (or did the bank's digital display just not have a third number slot??) isn't conducive to thoughtful writing. I don't know. And I am torn between wanting to apologize for whining or just relaxing into what is. We so often think we know how something should feel and then when it feels differently we decide we haven't had the experience yet. We wait for the predetermined feeling, which rarely shows up. Maybe I am waiting for my cross-country trip.

Warsaw, Indiana. We are hanging with an international crowd now, baby. And although the orthopedists who didn't appear to be speaking Polish and their convention took all the king-sized beds, and the Bennigan's menu had no fruit, I did manage a spinach salad and a quesadilla and life was looking up.

We had to escape the lovely (not meant sarcastically, it really was minus the weather) Potato Creek State Park with all $17.36 worth of attractions because after one night in which I was pretty certain I'd suffocate in the heat, we once again were hotel-bound.

Life is nothing if not a paradox, and the cheap hotel vs fancy hotel playground of counter-intuitive-ness is no exception. Cheap hotels: frig in room. Fancy: nope. Cheap: free wifi. Fancy: maybe, or maybe you have to go to the “business center” and pay more.

Soon enough we'd be on the road again and clearing another border, where the world was at our feet. Ohio brought us through Delphos, Lima, and Cairo.

Allow me to pause here to compliment you, America, on the dramatic improvements you've made to the state of road stop restrooms since I last drove across your varied and vast terrain. I've even been greeted on occasion with postings of impassioned pleas by managers asking me to inform them should the cleanliness of the facilities fall below my standards. 

In other random updates, Emily still somehow doesn't hate us. Claws scraping tracks through carpet – always brown or navy and patterned with colored speckles to disguise godknowswhat – as we drag her out from under the hotel bed, she complains briefly, then takes her place in the centerpiece of our lives, the mobile salon of destiny, home, the van. (By the way, the van needs a name. Thoughts???)

She mostly stays to her upper level space while we're going along, though she still visits me sometimes to stare hard out the front windshield or just for a hug. Nine more pounds pressing on my bladder with the already-accomplished fetal creature doing its best to render me a slave to the above-mentioned sparkly toilet rooms is not really ideal, but I figure perhaps by the time we hit D.C., she'll have shed most of that weight from stress.

Ohio eventually remitted the town of Hudson, where we found sanctuary at our friends' Lisa and Scott's. For me, two very welcomed nights of standing in a kitchen talking, while things were chopped, measured, and tasted, with the vague knowledge of children playing somewhere nearby, while my cat relaxed into the central AC, and my vision for what was ahead didn't steady so much as gain momentum from talking about what had come before and the paths we'd each followed since, to land us here, to this square of the world, to this sip of soup.