Day 7: April 14, 2000
Drive to Bay Area from Las Vegas

We decided to head straight home today instead of checking out Vegas more. We figure we'll come back some weekend. We got onto the freeway just fine, but then got off to get some gas. There was an accident at the next entrance, so we had to keep going and wound up in one of these bizarre situations where you simply cannot get on the freeway. The road wound away from the freeway, so we tried to go as close to parallel to it, but then couldn't make U turns when we needed to. Finally, we got on a freeway that looked like it connected with the one we wanted, but it had no entrance. We got off and again, couldn't get on until finally we made an illegal U turn and made it. Sheesh!

Libby!

We listened to Harry Potter much of the way home, which went pretty quickly taking 15 and then through the desert to Barstow, across to Bakersfield and then up 5 to 580. At one point, though, we stopped the tapes and I came up with a game where you have to rank order things you like. We did a bunch of lists of things. Some of them were general, comparing things like food, sex, computers, reading, etc. I was surprised that Walendo ranked reading higher than computers. I made Walendo rank order specific foods and was surprised that chicken, turkey and mashed potatoes came out ahead of steak. He also had to rank technology gadgets. Walendo made some lists for me, making me choose among things I'd like to change about myself, specific foods, and things I like to do ("giving my opinion" was hard to give up and wound up high on the list). It was a fun diversion.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. We stopped once in Mojave at a grocery store, but mainly we just drove. My back started hurting a lot and I had to lie down in the back, falling asleep for part of Harry Potter, sigh. We came into the Bay Area at around 5:30 on a Friday, but we were mostly going against traffic so we didn't hit anything too bad. We got home around 6:15, in just under 9 hours. We'd figured it would take about 12 hours, but this route at least was much faster. We'd gotten only about half way through the second Harry Potter tape and Walendo wanted to sit in the car listening more, but we decided to listen as we did errands in the car.

We got in, Walendo went right for the computers to boot them up and I unpacked. (You'll note that he didn't immediately sit down to read. That's all I'm saying.) After reading our mail and such, we went to the grocery store and picked up the movie The Insiders and some deli for dinner, which was very yummy. We watched the Insiders, which was very good, and then noodled a while longer on the computers. Finally, we went to sleep in our own cozy bed.

Previous   (Zion to Las Vegas)