Between yesterday and today, I drove eight-ish hours, and traveled here from one hour into the future. Needless to say, I’m still pretty well exhausted. I did consider going for an easy, lazy post again, but I know my brain well enough to know some of the details will start disappearing before long. The steel trap of my memory. Yeesh.

That being said, where to even start? What to even say? This post is going to wander into some very sentimental territory, so I feel like I’ll have to balance that out by posting nothing by snide remarks and biting comments tomorrow.

I’m not even sorry to say this, but home is most certainly where the heart is. By that reasoning, I’m at home in the Pittsburgh area, Hollidaysburg, and Chicagoland. This trip only acted as a strong reminder that home isn’t necessarily just one location, and it’s certainly a good feeling to know I’ve got a couple places I can go to feel like I’m where I belong.

Let’s not discount how I drove further than I’ve ever gone before, and that really made my trip an adventure. I’ve talked about the drive there, so I’m just going to take a quick moment to repeat how I’m glad I didn’t die or get lost towards the end.

Two of my three homes. Not pictured: Hollidaysburg, because apparently Starbucks doesn’t have much love for Historic Holiidaysburg.

Once I got out of the car and staggered into Jason’s house, Jason a good deal more capable of walking than I am, my focus was on not letting my legs fall off and getting food. In that order. I definitely wanted a drink after the last leg of the trip, and probably a multi-day nap. In light of the latter option not being plausible, I made sure I ordered a drink at the burger place we went to…only to find out they were out of gin, which was kind of crucial since the drink was named GINcident. So much for that. I did, however, get the bartender to make a Blood & Sand, which makes yet another location that now knows what the hell a Blood & Sand is thanks to me. Hooray there.

The short version of last week is that it was certainly a vacation. There was no work (victory), minimal writing (damn it), plenty of good times, and more board games than I expected (many of which I lost). I could go into the daily details, but I think it’s better to just say not a day of my trip was wasted. Even the part where some shithead snagged my debit card info. That part wasn’t ideal, but I’m resilient and made it past that nonsense.

My trip back to Hollidaysburg today was a sleepy one, and I have to admit there was a small level of temptation to merge right and onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike instead of left onto William Penn Highway. Mostly because I return to work from my vacation on Tuesday. Okay. Exclusively for that reason.

Friday night’s antics involved me enjoying perhaps a bit too much alcohol (and I suppose I should thank, yet again, the good people who continued to refresh my glass of post-booze water as I needed it).

There’s, as it turns out, a lot more I want to say about this than I can seem to transfer from my brain to the keyboard. My defense for this is that I did slip in cat vomit just a little bit ago and nearly took down my kitchen table, so that didn’t help my focus much.

This vacation wasn’t just traveling for me so much as it was going to a home away from home. I did my best to give Jason grief and pass my righteous, borderline psychotic judgment on Joanna (Jason’s new leading lady who also happens to be Groot; not sorry for the blog mention here). I’ve established that if I had the money I would gladly move to the Chicagoland area. Probably. It would work out until I suddenly showed up dead after driving certain people completely insane.

Seriously, slipping in cat vomit was just awful though. Be grateful this sappy-emotion train got derailed, folks.