Day Sixteen, End of Trip

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It's been a few days since the last entry dated Monday, 22 June. The majority of the time since then has been in the car driving.
I left at 7:30AM from Laredo, TX and arrived in Wichita, KS around 7PM driving a bit over 760 miles. The morning was brutal. I went to bed late the night before and woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep. As I was driving through Texas that morning I regretted the decision to just get up and make productive use of the time by getting an early start on the road. Hard to keep awake. Assuming more risk behind the wheel than I had felt comfortable with that morning until I got my second wind in the early afternoon.

Decided to get the oil changed, tires rotated and balanced and wheels aligned before departing Wichita--over 3000 miles at this point and the car had started pulling to the left. The tires are pretty new so I want them to last. Because of the time at Meineke, I didn't get on the road until after 9AM. I didn't have a US road atlas or any AAA maps of these states so I was at the mercy of directions printed out at the hotel from yahoo. I stuck with them all the way to Iowa City, IA then decided that I could make better time staying in interstates rather than getting on a US highway from Cedar Rapids, IA to Madison, WI. Boy was I wrong. I seriously miscalculated the distance that keeping to the interstates would add to the trip. And I heard later that the US highway had been upgraded to 4-lane highway. Basically, I added over 100 miles and 2 hours to the trip because of construction traffic passing through Davenport, IA. I wound up driving 790 miles in a bit less than 12 hours on the road.

Thursday I was finally able to sleep late before heading over to Milwaukee with Kris for a Bon Jovi concert--it's my 5th or 6th time tagging along with her to see him. I really feel my age this time. Thankfully the concert is only 2 hours but standing the whole time is hard on the feet and back. I can't wait for the break before the encore to sit down. We are back a bit but directly in front of the stage and it's very loud. My ears hurt; hopefully didn't suffer any hearing loss. I really hope this is my last Bon Jovi (or probably anybody else for that matter) live concert. From Kris' comments, I don't think she'll be rushing out to see him any more either--too much new stuff that she isn't so familiar with. I'm more than okay with that.

Friday I headed out from Madison, WI and stopped by to check on our pop-up camper in storage at Naval Training Center Great Lakes, which is in the far northern suburbs of Chicago, IL. This turned out to be a less than brilliant idea since I wound up going through Chicago on what a normal person would think is a good time--the middle of the day/early afternoon on a Friday. But in Chicago in the summer that happens to be the start of rush hour. It takes me a bit over 3 hours to get from the north side to the south side of Chicago. That's right--three hours. I'm from New York so I'm used to traffic, but I've never been through anything like this going from one end of a city to the other, simply incredible. The traffic reports on the radio every 10 minutes didn't help either: the guy talked so fast I could barely understand what he was saying and the highways all have names there so if you don't know what they are the reports won't help you unless you match the name with the highway number on the map, plus I didn't know where I was in relation to any of the street names or landmarks he was using as guidepoints. It will be a long time before I drive through Chicago! I end the day at Champaign, IL and spend the night with Kris and the kids visiting with my sister- and brother-in-law.

Saturday we leave together around 9:15AM headed for Arlington, VA. I wasn't sure about driving all the way through but we decided to try. We hit Morgantown, WV around 6:30PM and stop for dinner. At this point we're about 3 hours from the end so we go for it. We're back on the road by 7:30PM and finally pull into the hotel in Arlington, VA at 11PM. With the 1 hour time change, we drove about 12.5 hours. A long day after several other long days of driving. I'm exhausted. I can't believe the kids made it--they did very well in the car. Kris hangs on barely, pushing through to the end.

In the lingo of US Department of Defense travel, the reason for this stop would be Mission Complete.

It's been sixteen (16) days since I left Tegucigalpa, Honduras. I've seen a lot of neat stuff and had a great time along the way. To give some perspective of what the last week has been like: the trip odometer was at 1705 miles when I departed Guadalajara on the morning of Monday, 22 June. When I pull into the hotel at 11PM on Saturday, 27 June the trip odometer now reads 5023 miles. I've driven over 3300 miles, mostly in four brutal days in the car.

I'm ready for a rest on Sunday. Monday I check in and work starts. Wednesday the household goods arrive and we get to spend the 4th of July weekend arranging the furniture in the new house.

As busy and full as my days these last few weeks have been (and will be for the next week or so), I am trying to keep up with what has been going on back in Honduras. Still in touch with friends and contacts there. Interested in it from a number of vantage points: as a political science scholar whose specific area of expertise is civil-military relations in Latin America and studied coup's in detail; as one who lived there for two years with a lot of friends still living there and consequently maintain more than a passing interest in what occurs there; as a military professional who has contacts with Honduran military officers, including one friend who was a classmate at a year-long school I attended several years ago; as an aspiring Army attache whose job would include being informed beforehand about such things.

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