the cartographers

well it seems i have a lot of writing to do. a couple friends asked for regular updates while i was in virginia and despite my best intentions, those updates clearly never came. my extremely legitimate excuse is that i was enjoying my holiday too much to write about it.

so that puts me here. drinking a beer and watching usc destroy oregon in the second half. as i write i'll toss up each day… so stay tuned.

–
friday

disclaimer: i haven't read any of tripp's posts on virginia.

i woke up friday morning at about 4:30. hadn't packed my suitcase but i wasn't worried. there was roughly 45 minutes to pull everything together and i knew where everything was that i needed. packing at the last minute forces you to be a lot more discriminating; as long as you have the essentials locked in, there is little reason to spend hours mulling over each item in the bag. super shuttle showed up, i grabbed my laptop bag, camera bag and suitcase, tripp followed and we were off.

the shuttle picked up 4 more passengers after us, a couple of whom were girls, one still drunk from the night before. she told us about the 30th birthday of her friend that they had just celebrated and that their destination was hawaii. it sounded a lot less sexy to tell them that we were going to richmond, virginia. but i wasn't jealous; i want to go places that i've never been. tripp and i talked some about startup. i really hope that we find a way to work together some day.

we flew airtran airlines. another first for me. apparently they're based out of atlanta, which explains why we flew there first on our way to dulles. not much to say about the 2 flights. i read battle royale and took a few cat naps. once we disembarked and made our way to the hertz lot the ease of travel ceased (siezed?). not being 'gold club' members, we had to go stand in line with the rest of the unwashed masses. unfortunately, that meant a >30 minute wait to pick up the keys to the car. for some reason, there weren't enough employees, despite the fact that they had the reservations ahead of time and must have known that there would be a bottleneck. so maybe that's the point to the gold club? we waited it out as there was no other choice. when we got to the front of the line, the guy was a jerk. tripp gave him the reservation number and he said: "great. did you memorize that?". fucker.

i drove and tripp navigated down to mechanicsville. 100 miles or so. a little under 2 hours of driving and we arrived at 9:30 (if you're keeping track then you'll know that that is roughly 13 hours door to door). we drove to church first to pick up tripp's mom at a quilting retreat, mostly because her friends wanted to see the healthy son that they had been praying for over the last year. someone said that all the women and sewing machine's looked like a sweatshop. tripp drove the rental car and ann drove me back to the family home.

more to come…

–
actually no. that's it. sorry. (20051128)