“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” - Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"
“One
goodbye…is never enough!” Each time I think that phrase in my head I hear that guy in
Oklahoma (the musical, and maybe the sate) singing it when he’s showing that
one chick how the Parisians say goodbye…some of you know what I’m talking about
and some of you don’t, but the statement is still true whether you sing it in
your head or not. Fort Wayne, we cannot
be limited to a one time goodbye! We
have to do it once…and then again…and yet again…and then we’ll really be
gone…you know, until we come back to visit.
And we WILL come back to visit.
Fort
Wayne, we love you. Well, I’ll speak for
myself and say that I love you. I truly do.
As the time to leave zoomed up to our front door and asked if we were
ready to go it seemed as though Fort Wayne decided to put up just a little bit
of a fight to show she (yes, I think of this town as a female. Pretty sure
that’s an instinctual decision on my part) loved us too but also that she loved
us enough to let us take our lessons we learned here and apply them to a new
life in a new city that we would someday also fall in love with. What a gracious place you are, FW, and this
is just one of the many reasons why I adore you. How fortunate am I to have been exposed to
so many amazing people and ideas while living in the Fort? I feel as though I was just uncovering the
beginning of something on the fast track to an over flow of awesomeness. I hope that the sense of community I was only beginning to discover continues to
grow. It is an amazing thing to stumble
upon and to be able to be a part of it, even if it’s more at the fringe than in
the center. To those shaking and
stirring things up, I salute you, envy you and am inspired by you! Please keep being the amazing presence you
are!
But
back to leaving…Saturday, our last day in the house, was some sort of semi-organized pandemonium. We were finishing up with the packing and
loading and pitching that we had been working on for most of the week but the time had come to truly break down home into house. Each room was gone through systematically and was emptied and cleaned. The process was tiring, frustrating and
sad. We will be returning to Fort Wayne
in a few days but we will never return to our home there. It is hard to say good bye when you have so
many amazing memories of a place.
Daylight
was nearly gone by the time we were ready to fold up the camper and get our
butts on the road. Walking around the camper I realized we had a side that
wasn’t latched as it should be. It was
broken. Fantastic. The latches help to hold the top of the
camper down while you’re driving, the front latches are especially important. Not too shocking that the front left side was
the one busted. We drove with it, the
determination that had kept us going through out the day turned into foolish
stubbornness. We hoped that if we just pushed forward long enough to find
dinner we could give it a short test run to see how it would do. Well, the back left latch decided to join the
front left latch and we now had a real problem.
Thankfully, extremely hungry and worn out boys pick out places to eat located right by
Meijer stores! Yay for greasy
deliciousness in the form of a Steak and Shake! Dinner was consumed quickly enough and the
hunt for ratchet straps (the solution we decided to try to keep the top of the
camper down) was begun. We were able to
find what we were looking for and bought two, one for in the front, one for in
the back…but neither Andrew or I really knew how to use them. Thirty minutes later we had the Mark Twain successfully strapped down and our trip
to Lansing begun! Whew!
We did arrive late (or would 4 am be considered early?) to Aunt Linda, Uncle Kevin, and Grandma Rita's house but thankfully Aunt Linda was awake to say hello and help us get settled in for the night...um...morning? But that shall be the next part of the story! I have been trying to get this done for days. Who knew relaxing could be so time consuming? :) Right now I have a morning kayak date with my husband and a travel mug of coffee. Have an amazing day all!
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