Alright so this one is most assuredly NOT a convention, but it's definitely one of the most furry things that's ever happened to me, and definitely something I never would've gotten into if I hadn't at some point made the decision to make cartoon animal people a huge part of my life. Actually scratch that I don't think I ever made that decision, it just kinda happened to me. I think that's how life goes. Lots of people have similar explanations for how they ended up in their present career, living accommodations, relationship, or why they have children now. I guess that's just the mechanism by which life operates, so let's dive in, shall we?

Alright, first some background to set the scene. I had been looking for a job for nearly all of 2017 by November of that year. The response pattern from potential employers that I had become familiar with was that I'd hear nothing for about 4 or 5 months and then get a quick form-letter email about how I could fuck off. So I felt like I had quite a lot of time to spare. Painfully so, in fact. So when an artist I'd been following for a long time named Spunkymutt had an offer up for about a week's employment I was intrigued. The opening was for a set of qualifications that I neatly matched. That is to say, someone with a car and license, a valid US passport, and quite a lot of contiguous free time. I actually still had an unused passport that I got when I was in the navy just in case and I'd never needed it, so I was all set.

When I inquired as to the nature of the work I found that Spunky needed to move from pretty far north in Ontario all the way down to Georgia. Quite a trek to be sure. She also had quite a volume of personal effects, a dog-shaped dog, and a human-shaped horse named Clovar to move as well. I forget the dog's name, so I'm gonna call him Sargent Claymore Sparkcannon because that sounds really dope. And don't ask me the breed either. He was a medium-small mottled tan thing that was probably just a mutt. Spunky told me a few of the breeds involved but many of them were unfamiliar and unnecessarily wordy so I lost interest midway through her enumerating the list. You may say that's inattentive but hey, when I say that something is too wordy you can take that to the bank!

We worked logistics for several weeks and settled on a date that worked. She was planning on just piling into the car, but I think she had a somewhat distorted idea of what the dimensions of a car are. I've done some impressive moves with just my profoundly average mid-size sedan, but that was always with just me. Once I heard that I'd have 1.5 extra passengers besides her, I knew we'd need some help. So I got a trailer hitch attached to my car in the interim. I suppose I get to keep that, but I don't know how much use I'll get out of it before this car finally bites the dust. It's 14 years old now, but I haven't worked it too hard in that time, averaged only 10,000 miles a year in its life. It's vacation away from the blight of northern road salt certainly did it some good. Anybody's guess really. Anyways, once I convinced my parents that running off to meet up with some randos from the internet and hang with them for a week was somehow a good idea, and had conversed with Spunky enough to convince her of much the same, I was off on my quest. It's actually kind of funny how well a fully-developed FA profile worked in my favor in that regard. Like, there's a LOT of content on there, over years of experience. If I'm pulling some kind of deceptive shenanigan here then it's one hell of a long con. Being a resumé for a chauffeuring job was never something that I intended my FA profile to be, but there ya go.

I'd researched the border crossing extensively, because the last time I'd gone to Canada it was before they'd started requiring passports to do it. I still didn't need to get a visa or anything because my visit was going to be quite short and I wasn't really going to be residing there at all, so the process was still relatively simple, it seemed. I'd asked about it and Spunky assured me it was nothing to worry about it. Dating someone from the frozen north as she was, she'd had much experience with it, and found it to be a friendly enough process. That was certainly true on the way in. They asked where I was going and why, what I had with me, and that was basically it. Didn't even look in my trunk. So with that hurdle behind me there was nothing left to conquer but a couple hundred miles worth of the Queen Elizabeth Way. I made it to Sudbury on my first day. That was a somewhat conservative goal for when I was coming right off the block, but I knew I'd have a LOT of driving ahead of me. Sure, you can drive for 12 hours a day and manage okay, but you're sure as hell not going to do that seven days in a row. So yeah, factoring in the slowdown from towing, moving stuff, and other complications, I settled on about eight hours a day in my plan. Yeah, y'all know what happens to plans every time, but it's good practice to at least draft one up. You don't have to stick with it, in fact you almost certainly won't, but at least HAVE a plan, jeeze.

So yeah, as I'd described the length of the journey to my friends "It'll be a whole day of driving to be not there yet." My stay at the Knight's Inn Sudbury was definitely a great way of beginning a journey of a thousand miles by getting your foot stuck in a sinkhole and faceplanting straight onto a handful of rusty razor blades. I don't have a lot of preference for hotel rooms, really. I just don't use them often enough to really have developed an opinion. Like 80% of my hotel rooms are bought to stay at cons and for those you just pick the ones with the con rate that are the easiest to fursuit at, or more likely, just whatever will take you and has less than seven people in the room already, since most cons these days seem to be bursting their hotels at the seams. That leaves one without really much of a decision about accommodations, so I never really developed any sort of brand loyalty for hotels. And realistically, operating in my price range, I've never really had any standout good or bad experiences that would lend me towards or away from a particular manner of lodging. Well, consider that milestone crossed, because I've got some things to say about the smoking crater that I spent that first night in.

It seemed like absolutely everything that I encountered in sequence from the moment I checked in was fucked up. The door latch was sticky and finicky. And I don't mean in the normal way where the locking monostable in the door requires you to perform the spinning lotus jujitsu with your card to trigger it and has a cartoonishly inflated idea of what human reaction time looks like. I mean just like structurally the door is perpetually jammed in a way that makes you feel like you're always breaking into your own room. Shoulder-checking was the only thing that consistently got you inside. The lightswitch right inside the door had no effect, so I had to wade into the darkness a bit to find a light I could actually use. The first thing the lamp by the bed illuminated was the fact that the phone jack had been torn out of the wall and left dangling there like the half-severed arm of a battlescarred highlander. Further investigation was a long parade of further disappointments. Despite lacking an alarm clock, the room seemed to have an array of devices that far exceeded its capacity for electrical service. I found that I already had to choose between the floorlamp and the fridge, and that was before I tried to come up with a place to plug in my laptop. After working out the power problem I found a wireless connection so spotty it made me worry I was on one of those "holodeck glitch" episodes of Star Trek where the simulation that I'm in can't handle what I've just asked of it.

Most baffling and infuriating of all though, was the fact that the thermostat had a hard temperature cap, and a low one at that. I thought that it was just stuck or something, but it was happy to let me set lower temperatures. It just wouldn't ever go over 15 degrees. Now because I was in the Canuck Republic at the time, I'll have to translate that into baseball and patriotism units for you. It's about 59 Freedom degrees. Not inhumane, but still a strikingly low cap. I could understand them not wanting people to crank it way the hell up and chain together a string of coffee pots to make a sauna in there, but that's a damn low bar for temperature. Now, I was still playing it conservatively I had plenty of time to myself that night, so naturally I set about removing the thermostat housing and then duct taping a bag of ice over it. That's more extreme than I'd normally go, but I had to draw a line in the snow about these squalid conditions SOMEwhere.The worst part of it was that I'd felt SO smart about booking two nights in a row there so I'd have the convenience of staying there both coming and going, so now I was stuck with it. Ah well, live and learn and all that. I'm sure it'll make for a good story someday.

Soon enough I was on my way to pick up my cellmates for the night. It's some nice country out there, which is some comfort because driving past trees and rocks is basically all you're going to be doing now that you're leaving civilization behind. I was running pretty short on gas by the time I reached Timmins, where my charges resided, so for better or for worse that was the most exciting part about that leg of the trip. Wondering if you're going to end up stalling out in the middle of the wilderness is certainly a kind of excitement. Between the conversion to funny-money and communism-gallons I couldn't even take a rough stab at what gasoline cost. A fair share more than in the land of obnoxious craft beer and cultural appropriation, but that's just one of those decisions where you realize that you'll be stranded in the frozen tundra without it so you just pony up. Fortunately global warming seemed to be doing its thing this time around and we actually had fairly little snow interference for a trip that sent me to a town so far up the map that it had no roads going north out of it.

Something that really caught me off guard about the trip was the fact that my phone didn't work in Canada. At all. No part of it. Strange, given that it worked in Dubai and Saudi Arabia and a half-dozen European countries just fine. Not sure what the deal there was, but there was really nothing for it but to press on. It was that extra little bit stressful because of course once I'd gotten comfortable with the idea that I'd have nothing to do for a long time to come, my job search heated up all of a sudden. I contacted a place called First Energy in October through a Facebook listing, and in less than two weeks they were flying me out there to interview. It went pretty well and they said that they'd get back to me. Naturally they'd gotten back to me several times with "well we don't have an answer yet." So being out of touch with them was a little nerve-wracking. First Energy had been sitting on this offer all week. Infuriating, but then again I didn't think they'd string me along if the answer was no.

In any case, I made my way to the Uhaul place to pick up the trailer I was going to be using. I got an idea of how far north I'd really gone when I found that the clerk there had some pretty spotty English. It really put me to test for a bit. My high school French class was twelve years past by this point. In the end my kinda-French and his kinda-English stumbled our way to a rental agreement, and I was on my way with a big orange box to trundle along behind my car. Towing with my car was a first for me, so it was kinda tough to know what to expect. The loss of visibility and reduction in top-speed were easy enough to predict, as were the reductions in acceleration and stopping power, but I underestimated just how stressful it is to tow something with a vehicle that's hardly optimized for that sort of thing. It makes a lot of disquieting noise that you have to adjust to. You have to let sounds that have for so long meant "something is catastrophically wrong" become routine, so that's a big blood pressure factor there. There's also the fact that roads that close to the edge of the Earth aren't that well manicured much of the time. Understandable, but the mechanics of a hitch ball tend to turn any bouncing motion of the trailer into a lateral motion in the car, creating a shaking stutter back and forth with the car's movement and making you feel like Cerberus has taken hold of the car in his jaws and is trying to shake it to pieces. There are moments of respite, but those are just so that Ol' Spotty-three-head can pass it from set of cavernous jaws to another when his neck gets tired from thrashing you about.

Regardless, I still had my escort mission to see to. I made it to the right spot, after knocking on the door of the wrong spot a couple times. The house is one row back from the street so it's easy to miss the first time. I took a bit of time to discuss the admittedly troubling matter of the fact that a skeezy internet stranger was kidnapping his grandson with the man of the house, and I think I made the best of that conversation, honestly. Knowing myself as I do I never would've expected that I'd be the type to develop any sort of charm, but I seem to be passing some pretty steep charisma checks without incident, so it seems anything is possible! We loaded everything up and my choice of the trailer was vindicated, as we got that thing about 40% full of stuff that would've gotten left behind otherwise. It also meant that we had plenty of space for people in the main cabin because we didn't have to jam stuff in there. Useful for morale on a long haul like this.

Spunky worried a bit about having Sgt. Claymore Sparkcannon in the car for so long. One of the reasons that I was needed was that he doesn't fly well, being a sensitive smol doggo and all. So there was some concern about he'd fare spending such long stretches in a car. He seemed to settle down pretty easily though. We had to take extra breaks for him, but other than that he wasn't a huge complication to the trip. I got everybody back to the Knights Inn without incident such that they could suffer though another internment there with me. We took a bit of a walk in a direction that may have actually been completely arbitrary and ended up at a place that sold food. We had a good time swapping stories there.

A lot of the labor burden here was on me, because neither of my passengers were licensed to drive, but I could already tell that having traveling companions would make this whole thing a lot less interminable. It was striking how much we ended up talking about practical adult stuff. Spunky is only just now getting into such things, so they were of keen interest to her. The cause of that experience gulf became starkly apparent to me when she asked what it was like to see 9/11 happen. I had gotten used to a younger crowd going to college and many furry events where late-teens sort of folks are still quite common. This got to me a little bit though. It was one of those moments where you get suddenly ambushed by time and have to reset the way you think of things. "Oh yeah, you're like 20. You wouldn't have... whoa. Oh shit I need a minute." I got my stride back after a bit of introspection and we managed to cover quite a few things. Credit cards, credit rating and finances, furry con logistics, taxes, job stuff, a lot of things I really wished someone would've explained to me when I was her age. Ew, 'when I was her age'. Remind me to not say things like that ever again.

I'd left a fair bit of time to spare on this day, and picked a roost just on the other side of the border. That way any hangups at the checkpoint would be padded out nicely and we'd be able to take that hit if it came. Unfortunately I underestimated a fair bit how hard border crossings can hit. Getting back into America was a far cry from the polite wave and a nod that I got going in the other direction. Pretty much an even split as to whether any given person will be happy or dismayed to hear that there's a row of super-jacked nightclub bouncers all along our border, but that's the way of it. We were stopped for quite some time while we got grilled by this guy who looked like he ate a bowl of bottlecaps for breakfast every morning before dramatically skullbashing the door open. I took it pretty seriously just because I knew that even if you're completely on the up and up just making these guys a little suspicious could cost you easily a day of administrative delays. It is the US government after all. So if there was a time to put on one's serious face, this was it. I certainly had my composure put to the test during the part of the interrogation wherein I got out to open up the trailer for him Jockswole McGridiron put the query to me thusly:

"Alright, if you lie to me about this you're all gonna be in big fucking trouble, so tell me right now: who's stuff is this in the back?"

I definitely wasn't planning on lying to him before but I extra SUPER didn't lie to him thanks to his particular choice of words. It still kinda felt like the wrong answer though, because we were shuttled off to a processing facility and detained there. Now don't get the wrong idea we weren't arrested or anything, but people with guns told us to get out of the car and go wait inside. So you know, kinda splitting hairs there really. Quite a nerve-wracking wait to find out just exactly what we did wrong. It turned out that they didn't like how much stuff Clovar was bringing with him because he had a visitation visa and this made it look like he was moving to America. When Spunky bristled at the accusation, I couldn't help but point out to her that he very much WAS trying to move to America, as that activity was what I'd been contracted to facilitate. Being confronted with this started to get everybody worried that we were in big trouble, but I kept my cool. Apparently my years of having important government people try to intimidate me was exactly the skill set that was needed for this juncture of our adventure. The reality of this simply was that Clovar had asked to come into America, and that request was refused. So we'd have to turn around and... figure out what to do next. I didn't have a revised gameplan yet. However I was quite certain that the mean bouncers wearing numerous weapons would most assuredly make certain that whatever we come up with, that plan starts with the car facing in the Canada direction.

I called it accurately, and that was basically what happened after a suitable delay for a cavalcade of bureaucratic rubberstamping. It's not the worst way for that to have gone, but we were already dejectedly composing a new plan as we approached the Canadian checkpoint after traversing the interstitial demilitarized zone a second time. Canada, to our surprise, was displeased to see us back. Now, being detained in Canada is a much more polite and congenial affair, but we still had to go inside and haggle for our fates with a desk clerk, an experience none of us cared to repeat. It would seem that Spunky had overstayed her welcome in the northlands whilst visiting her better half, and as such they were disinclined to let her back in. So we found ourselves at something of an impasse.

Yeah, remember that movie The Terminal where Tom Hanks gets trapped in an airport because some little legal snag had both host and destination countries saying "Um whups, no you can't come in." Seems like such an absurd movie premise that it would be fun to explore, right? Because that's just the kind of Kafkaesque exaggeration of the sprawling bureaucratic iniquities of our system that feels familiar but would never actually happen? Well, not only is that plot based on a true story wherein exactly that happened, for YEARS to some unfortunate soul, something very similar nearly ended up happening to us.

This is the difficult nature of border crossings. Really all they can do is bar you or not bar you, so there's not a lot of finesse to that decision. They also tend to be conservative with that judgment call. Even though we fully intended to get people repatriated properly, they had no way of assuring that we would make good on our word, since they don't have any enforcement power over us after we leave the checkpoint. So plead as she might, the guards' suspicion that Spunky might return to the heinous crime of... being in Canada too long was too great to let this pass unchallenged. I, being a fair sight less emotionally distressed by the proceedings, and also versed in the ways of obstructive bureaucracy, decided to put my faith in all that Canadian politeness shtick and take a last hail Mary shot at charming us past the guards.

"Alright look, I realize that this is a difficult position for you as well and I'm very sorry that we've misunderstood the regulations at play here. It's abundantly clear that the most bureaucratically expedient thing for us to do would be to send the American back to America and the Canadian back to Canada. I would be happy to arrange that as a final state, but the fact is that we have only one car. As such we need a solution that has all of us leaving here traveling in the same direction because I will not abide having one of us sleep here on the floor tonight while we sort out the legal niceties."

That one took a lot of thought to put together. Fortunately I'd had plenty of time to proofread it while we waited for the paperwork to grind through. I felt like I rolled a pretty solid persuasion check. I think that, plus the visible distress of my passengers, finally got them to take us at our word that we'd sort it out in exactly the way the Ministry of Truth wishes it in the end. They let us on our way with a stern wag of their finger, which I'm sure is the Canadian equivalent of 40 lashes. We moved quickly to a McDonalds to chill for a moment and collect ourselves, more because I needed some wifi to unfuck all of our logistics than anything else. I had a whole string of hotel reservations to cancel, and an as-yet-undetermined string of new ones to make. We batted a few ideas around, but I was pretty inflexible about what I'd let happen. There was talk of saying that Clovar was just visiting America, or bringing his stuff and then flying him, or just getting him there for a visit that was long enough to get married to Spunky. I wasn't up for ANY of that. I'll be party to NO plan that involves us saying things that are anything less than 100% true to the border patrol. The only reason that we got away this time with just some stern looks was because we didn't do anything illegal AND because we cooperated fully and told them the truth every time.

I really didn't want to say 'I told you so' because they were really trying to make this cross-nationality relationship work and were getting dicked around by the system in a way that's made them very genuinely upset. Really though, I'd previously mentioned that we had basically just elected a deflated orange, steaming wad of jingoism as president, and that wad got there by promising to dick around people who were trying to get into America as MUCH as possible, and I'd asked if they were sure that they had all the checks in the boxes before attempting this. So, whether or not they were Romeo and Julietting it up with trying to straddle these rival factions, I wasn't going to beat around the bush on telling them that I'm NOT about to legally stick my neck out for them to fix this mistake. I know that I just got into a whole hell of a lot more driving by going with that option, but particularly with an extensive government background check for my new job coming up I don't want to be testing out the limits of any federal laws right now! I believe I conveyed the sentiment with "Look, I'm happy to work with you on resolving this but if you cost me my shot at this job that I just spent a whole YEAR working to land I will leave you in the middle of the road and not even look back."

So, amicable agreement thus gained, we proceeded to our latest accommodations. I'd banked on making it a few hours back north that night because it wasn't too late and I was about to Groundhog Day the giant-ass drive that I had just done, and I paid dearly for that presumption. It turned out that we'd run into a busy part of the day for the QEW, and our two hour drive took us nearly five. It was too late to cancel our reservations for the night now, so there was no chance of getting anything closer. I had to power through. It was miserable. Trying to navigate all the heavy traffic with the giant rumbling trundlebox behind me was a nightmare, and I had to do it for just SO goddamn long. This was really the only part of the trip where I really suffered, and towards the end it was actually getting unsafe for me to drive, with my eyes bugging out and the whole deal. We made it okay though, and proceeded to some desperately needed rest.

We batted around the idea of leaving the stuff here and just getting Clovar back home, but that was still just a tiny bit deceitful, and also kind of a pain logistically. Finding storage for all of it on short notice would've been costly, and we found that even simply locating a storage facility with room open was quite difficult. We settled on leaving all of Clovar's stuff with him when we dropped him off. It would work fine because it was the transport of Sgt. Sparkcannon, not Clovar and his stuff, that had really necessitated a driving trip. The secondary benefit of this plan was that stripping off one passenger and set of equipment would unload us enough to fit everything in just the car. Quite possibly the only silver lining to be had in all of this. Honestly at that point I would've offered to drive Spunky to Mexico City if she offered to get that damn rickety chuckwagon off my back. I didn't know how much more of that damn thing I could take. And so it was that we did the first and second legs of our journey all over again. It was a lot quieter this time, with the mood being much more somber and introspective. We stopped at a Tim Horton's on the way up. An important ritual, I surmised. My time in Canada had led me to speculate that the real reason we'd failed to escape was because I had tried to leave the country without visiting at least one Tim Hortons.

We deposited Clovar and all his things, and of course got to hear the requisite "I told you so"s on that end. After that I got to put my charisma and intelligence modifier to the test again with a complex series of language and persuasion rolls to explain what the hell just happened and negotiate my way out of the contract I had for the now-empty insufferable wiggle wagon. The DM wouldn't let me look at how high the success DC for the checks were, so it's tough to tell if I just got slam-dunk rolls or Canadians are just really nice, but I got just about the best deal I ever would've dared hope for. Instead of charging me with violating our rental agreement, my homeboy at the edge-of-the-world storage depot communed briefly with the goddess U'Haulé in a far and distant plane of existence, and obtained the spiritual clarity to throw out the old agreement and draft a new one for a three-day local move. Basically he rewrote the rental contract for what I'd actually done with the trailer. An outstandingly equitable arrangement that had me leaving with a substantial refund. My first good news in awhile.

Since two of us (you'll never guess which two) had free accommodations in Timmins we decided to stay a night there and forego the progress we might've otherwise made that day. That was fine by me. My journey had gotten lighter but FAR longer, so if the two lovebirds wanted to afford me an extra break for them to spend one last night together I was all for it. It also left me a chance to try some poutine, thus making it even more official that I'd done all the requisite Canada things that I needed to. And so, we resumed. This next portion being the bulk of the trip you'd think there would be a lot of interesting things to say about it, but it was actually a fair bit quieter. We'd settled into a routine by this point, so a lot of it is covered under the "same shit" umbrella. Particularly since I'd done this part of the trip once already. Sgt. Sparkcannon was having an okay time of it too. He definitely unleashed a cacophony of rage at any cricket wiping its nose or any weaving spider dropping a stitch within 300 yards, as small dogs are wont to, but he was temperate otherwise. A few nights in he jumped into my bed at about 4AM and looked at me expectantly. I petted him for a bit, really unsure what to make of it. Like really, I'm glad that we're bros now little dude and I'm psyched about it too but this really isn't the time.

Suitably divested of our international fugitive, the second border crossing was mercifully uneventful. Since we were both American citizens we got the approval of the imposing wall of Oakley's and creatine supplements that makes up our national border. The big new wrinkle that came about upon our return to the land of sandwich buns made of fried chicken was that I found First Energy had been trying to call me a LOT while I was in Canada and my phone didn't work. They wanted to start all the background check processes and bring me in for a drug screening. Which, while not inherently definitive, are typically the last things you do before hiring someone. So the basically unlimited free time that led me to accept this quest might be about to come to an abrupt end in the best possible way.

Suddenly I was far less chill about our massive delays, but I still had a mission to complete. I'd really just have to do what I always do, take a shit sandwich and figure out how to gussy up the presentation to still win this round of Top Chef. As such I mixed in a lot of the business that I needed to. For me, Claymore's walkabout breaks (we were on a first-name basis by then) had become teleconferences with my new business associates, and suchlike. I made it work, but it's just so frustrating to try and do things while traveling. I had to drive to Kinkos, wait in line, print out some forms, fill them out, wait in line again, have them scanned, then email them. It's profoundly aggravating to do all that and pay $4.50 for something that would've been free and taken two minutes at home. Really not the best foot to lead with, but I'm sure dealing with my new employers won't ALWAYS be a mess.

The trip down through the US was mercifully free of major disasters. It even had a few pleasant things like a continental breakfast at the hotel that included biscuits and gravy, one of very few things I missed about the South. And yes, I did stop at a Waffle House on the way back up. There being a similar rule about WH in the South as there is about Timmy's in the far north. I wasn't about to invite the wrath of those particular uncannily specific demons of fate a second time. We took a few longer breaks to just kind of decompress a little. Getting up and driving all day followed by going to bed gets the job done quick, but it wears on you quite quickly. That went well. The detriment of that smooth sailing now being that a lack of problems means that there's very little of interest to talk about. I've wondered at times what makes my complaining so interesting, and I guess that's my answer! It's far easier to summarize something where it all went to plan. It's the disasters where things get interesting. It's like comparing a trainwreck to the green line getting there three minutes late like always. One of those scenarios is far more information-dense.

Anyways, at long last we made it to our destination. We unloaded everything amidst a pinball game of several additional small-to-medium-sized dogs, Claymore having endeared himself to the locals quite quickly, and at last I got a chance to really rest. It was a tumultuous time in the household, the details of which I won't go into for fear of revealing things that ought not be talked around, but it was certainly quite an environment to stumble into. I got a delicious hot meal in addition to the expected grilling for details about myself from Spunky's parents, so it's hard to complain too much. I tested their borders as far as humor pretty early when conversations veered political. I'd say the most telling sample was this:

"I don't believe in abortion."
"Oh really? Well you should. It's quite real. There's substantial evidence to back up its existence."

They actually thought that was pretty funny, which was an immense relief. I don't like to think about what can happen when a joke like that goes poorly. We got along great though, even a majority of the dogs got along with me. The atmosphere started typified by my passenger's family being understandably concerned that she had summoned this shady golem from the internet to pick up her and all her belongings, trusting a quite radical element with a great deal of capital value, not to mention her own safety. A pretty reasonable concern that I was not at all offended by. I'd have similar concerns in their place. What was a lot more surprising though, was how much that tone changed by the end of the day. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but it felt pretty good to start from the point of being a potential predator that they regarded with suspicion, and within a few hours having her mother ask "Well why aren't you dating this successful engineer here who stuck out his neck to help you instead of your unemployed musician boyfriend?" Heh, I would've liked to endear myself to them in perhaps a less... confrontational fashion, but hey, I'll take the compliments where I can get them.

In any case, I spent two nights in a hotel near there to rest up for my long return journey. I hung out with the local crew for some time and got to know the way of things. Good people all around. I even got to have dinner and visit a bit with an old friend from high school who lives in Savannah now. I was at a wedding right before I left on my adventure and saw her there. When it came up that I was going to be in Georgia the following week she said "Oh really? I live there now. You should stop by and say hey!" Wow, I don't think I could've written a lazier coincidence if I tried. Just goes to show how reality doesn't really care about what's realistic or not. I was very tired by then, and had considered sticking around a little more, but by then I was under the gun to get back home and get started working on preparing for my own big move, a task that loomed imposingly over me now that I had completed my escort mission.

Similarly I had planned to visit Kathy Garrison on the return leg. She's a good friend and webcomic author that I've kept in touch with over the years. She's actually included me as a character recently. Uri the brigadier hyena. (Named after Uranium, for my line of work.) My likeness is in the military as a nuclear engineer. He enjoys writing stories, is fairly glib and sarcastic, and is famously long-winded in his speech. So really it could hardly be more accurate. I'm amazed she managed to fit that much detail in there and still have it blend in with the story! It's been a bit since I've been out that way, and it would've broken up the much lonelier drive home. Of course as always, fate had other plans.

It would have been nice to have a little break on my way up, but I ended up taking my break in Georgia because by then I just couldn't drive anymore. From there I just pursued the most expedient route home. Adding any more driving time at that point was a daunting prospect. I had been driving a LOT. Easily four times the longest drive I'd ever done by that point, and far longer than I'd planned to initially. The trip total was nearly 4,500 miles in total over the course of 12 days. Plus, now I had work to do. Work that I couldn't very well say I was afraid of, having spent the majority of 2017 in search of it. So as it was, I returned home, and prepared for my next incredible journey. Hard to say what to make of this mission in the end, but overall I'm glad I did it. It's an experience that I wouldn't trade for anything. Not something that I'm gearing up to do again any time soon mind you, but I'm glad that I did it once in my life. I wish my new friends the best in starting their new lives in new places. Here's hoping that mine will go well too!