Tuesday

We arrived safe in my hometown of Greensboro, NC at five thirty. Now we've caught up with a couple of friends, had a couple of beers, and slowly the long road trip has begun coming off us. Our trip worked like this: we drove eleven hours from Monterrey, México to Katy, Texas on Sunday. Our tire blew out just outside of San Antonio and we had to unload all of our things to get at the mini spare. Those things wouldn't all fit back in on top of the flattened full-sized tire. Sunshine rode almost to Houston with extra luggage in her lap before we finally got nervous enough about the overloaded little mini-tire and stopped for the night. In Katy we could make use of a convenient garage mom located for us online. Monday morning the tire center replaced all four of our tires by eight fifteen. Then we repacked all of our stuff into the trunk during heavy rain and drove thirteen hours to LaGrange, GA--seventy miles southwest of Atlanta--and spent the night in a surprisingly nice Jameson Inn. The Cat, in a coma of bitter stoicism during her long and caged days, was beginning to really enjoy the nightly string of pristine hotel rooms. Today we made the six-hour drive to Greensboro in seven and a half because of a longish stop near Charlotte to abandon that poor creature at my mother's house. So: thirteen hundred miles I'm certain I could have driven in two days. That's how it was supposed to work. Instead it worked like this because of one popped tire. I was pretty irritated by things at first. But the silver lining was that we made the Louisiana run during daylight, and winter in the bayou is witchy and beautiful. [Cavin]