We picked up The Child at Mark's Mom's house, and said goodbye to everyone.
After we dropped off the car, Mark decided that The Child needed to navigate to our gate as practice for future solo air-trips. He did fairly well getting us to the air train and the TSA Pre-check line. I think we might need to work on reading signs, but I could be projecting my own inadequacies onto the situation.
Several unseasoned traveller moments later we were boarding the plane. We were the next-to-last folks to get onto the plane, with the result that all of the overhead bins had been inexpertly packed with Other People's Stray Items That Should Have Fit Under Seats. The Child's carry-on had to be checked in on the concorse. My carry-on started to be checked-in, but the flight attendent found some spare space in first class; then she forgot to tell me where my luggage was and I had to make inquiries.
There were a lot of families travelling with a lot of kids. Large families. And at least two Very Angry Babies. I was surprised by how irritated I was -- I don't know if it was luggage arrangement, or the child behind me kicking my chair seat, or the random shrieks, or not getting enough sleep, or Covid anxiety, or a general combination of airplane travel anxiety -- I had to keep reminding myself that travelling with kids is hard and that I should thank The Child for being a good travel companion for so many years.
I put in my (battery depleted) ear buds and cat napped for as long as the seat would let me.
The Child had the window seat, but I did manage to take a photo of Mt. Hood as we were flying into Portland. I know that it's late August, but Mt. Hood was looking brown and dried out as we passed it. Ursula LeGuin had a prescient vision of Mt. Hood when she wrote "The Lathe of Heaven" nearly fifty years ago. The haze smudging the other mountains and filling in the valleys was a sad reminder that forest fires were still burning and hadn't magically gone out while we were away. I thought it had rained while were were on the East Coast, but I guess it hadn't.
We survived baggage claim, located the car, and I drove us south and home.
Mark had promised The Child that we would stop about halfway home to get food at In-N-Out. It should have been called "In-An-Hour," because from the time we entered the driveway to the time we received our food, it took us 70 minutes. The food was fine, but I think I would have ordered ahead (not, judging by the line of foot-traffic folks, that it would have helped).
Probably the funniest thing about the wait was a discussion of 90's gay club music: I complained that at one point, dance music devolved into a series of frantic boops with no melody, designed to tickle the limbic brains of dancers who required an extra hit to their limbic brains in order to dance. "Explorer," by Clubroot was playing at the time, and I snorted because I realized it was only slightly more refined than the frantic boops of the '90's (but it at least pretends to have a melody).
"It's your kind of boops," The Child said.
This led to a discussion of how most dance music in the 90's wanted to be Darude's "Sandstorm" and the realization that The Child was really into "Sandstorm" because it was good for gaming to.
We got home at 7 PM and fed cats who were grateful that we did not have the dog with us.
That was the next day.
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