Road Trip, Part One.

You know you need to get out of town and on the road for your long trip home, but your timing isn’t quite right. Do you still do it, or wait 'til the morning to start fresh, having had a good night’s sleep--maybe avoid rush hour traffic and a crying baby (who HATES to be in a stationary vehicle)?

This was the question facing us at 4pm on a Thursday just before we headed to Michigan a few weeks back, and well, either our genius failed us, or we thumbed our noses at logic and packed the kids and the dog in the car anyway. First, we stopped at the bank to sign our power-of-attorney forms, since we’d be closing on the house in absentia. The frenetic little banker inside, who reminded each of us more than once just how much of a rush he was in, was the first sign of things to come. This was accompanied and/or followed by:


• The drive from Somerville to the Pike, normally a 15-20 minute endeavor, which took over an hour.
• The unrelenting sun, which I swear beat mercilessly down on us until 8 or 9pm, when our black dog had nearly melted in the hatchback.
• Surly parents (read: not speaking to each other at one point) and very crabby children—understandably so—one who relies on the motion of the car to be lulled to sleep, the other who cannot bear to hear his brother crying (“Mommy, you feed him NOW.” [of course this was physically impossible from the front seat of the car]) and so began a feigned wailing of his own.
• Traffic and construction speed limits once we hit the Pike, which put us just 2 ½ hours away from home after 7 hours on the road.*

*Did I mention that our A/C works sporadically at best these days and our car doesn't exactly accommodate 4 people and a large dog, plus all their gear (think essential baby gear that must be transported since grandma will not have an equivalent back in Michigan), without protest?

So, we crashed in Albany, New York—having successfully smuggled the dog into the not-so-pet-friendly hotel—and agreed to start fresh early the next morning. What time did we actually resume our travel? A much later 11 a.m., but after a healthy breakfast, no less!

House.

On May 29, we will be the proud owners of a modest 1400 square foot home (hey, it's a few hundred more than we have now!), just 2-3 miles from our current place--which means no major upheaval or forfeiting of the many comforts we've grown accustomed to (proximity to work, friends, church, entertainment, playgrounds, etc.). Hurrah!Here my mother's favorite "when it's meant to happen, it'll happen" phrase holds true. After six months, we scrapped the tiresome weekly open houses, took our condo off the market, and found a renter. Meanwhile we got serious about the house hunt again--having recovered from the offer that fell through a few weeks back--and this time WE trumped another buyer as we were able to be more flexible with the closing date. And we didn't have to sell our souls (waive the inspection and other contingencies) to do it...With the condo off the market, we were surprised to get a call from a realtor whose client "really wanted to buy into the building," and wondered if we'd consider re-listing our place if an offer was likely. So, for old time's sake we did a thorough Saturday cleaning, complete with scrambling, stashing, and arguing and showed the place on Sunday--the offer came in that night!All of this happened (the home purchase, the condo sale) quickly, over a long weekend. Add to this a new baby, and you have just a few small life changes converging. It's a bit like the way we came East: graduated, got married, honeymooned, and packed up the moving truck all in a month's time in 1997. We survived that, so surely we'll manage this.

In fact, we're happy to. Very soon we'll have a yard, a driveway, and a basement--woo hoo! Just a few basics that we haven't enjoyed since living at home with our parents. We laugh that city living in small spaces has so reduced our expectations that any home we acquire may as well be the Taj Mahal.