There and Back Again

Finding ourselves parked in several cars deep (I guess it was the valet section. Oops.), Patrick and I spent a day checking out Washington. The plan had been to head north and visit my friends in New York, but those plans were foiled by the need to return the rental van and my sudden driving urge to be back home.

The van probably deserves its own paragraph. Penske found one last way to screw with us. These are, mind you, the same people who gave away the car I had reserved initially, triggering all this vehicular wackiness in the first place. At the 11th hour, they changed their mind about the return of the van, refusing to accept any other options. The plan had been to drop it off in Fargo, catch a ride somehow to Minneapolis, and use car (parked there) to make it home. Penske decided it would be better if we returned it to Oregon, instead. I cannot be clear enough: they went back on their original word -- Fargo had originally been fine.

I hear good things about U-Haul.

Anyways, we found someone in Minneapolis willing to drive it back -- for an appropriate fee and airfare home. My job became getting it to him as soon as possible, in hopes that it would return to Oregon by the 1st.

But, being parked in, we spent a day looking at the city. A brief trip to the Holocaust museum quickly became more than I felt I could handle. The worst problem was the research I'd been hearing about; people are now looking into the lessons of the boarding schools (started in 1879) that the Nazis may have implimented during the 1940s. Evidence seems to indicate that some ideas, particularly about dehumanization, may have been directly borrowed. Whenever something truly meaningful happens, for good or ill, the ripples stretch out for incredible distances.

***

Once we finally got out of the city, Patrick was good enough to do almost all the driving. I wrote, thought, and slept... and played Zelda. We travelled in an almost straight line, with few stops. I needed to be home.

Maryland is very pretty. Wisconsin has reasonably affordable lazer tag. That's pretty much all I remember about the ride home. We dropped off the van with little fanfare in Minneapolis; I noted with smug satisfaction that everything in that huge, ungainly van fit into my '96 Camry. Together, Patrick and I made it to within 40 miles of home, at which point the transmition exploded.

I finished playing Zelda (Oracle of Seasons) in a ditch less than an hour from home. We'll call that something like an accomplishment.