Oh, I’m back.  Did I not mention that?  Possibly because I was refusing to let the trip end.  But, today was work and it couldn’t have hit me harder this morning that I am back to my normal life.

The trip was amazing.  I’ll never be able to explain it.  I never tried to explain the fun I had in Flagstaff last month because it was all too much.  This was so much more, how do I even begin?  Ten states in eight days, 500+ pictures, two falls down stairs, twice getting pulled over for speeding, many detours, and more stories then I could ever recount.  I have to try to document this, I never want to forget the details, it’s just going to take time.

This is on the steps of the Field Museum in Chicago, a city that wasn’t even remotely on our route home.  It was taken on our second day of wandering the city, a day that we’d planned to get up and drive to St. Louis, but we couldn’t force ourselves to leave this beautiful city and ended up staying another day.  For something that was never even discussed until we saw the exit on the highway I had the BEST time in Chicago.  We only decided to take that exit on the highway due to a math error (His, thank you.) but both of us would go back in a heart beat.

The whole trip was like this.  It wasn’t planned, a spur of the moment thing to get the boy and some stuff back to Phoenix, and it turned into the best vacation I’ve had so far.  We had very few plans laid out, and we didn’t even stick to those.  Everything was open, we could do anything we wanted to.  As long as we stuck together and (eventually) made it back to the Valley we were on schedule.

It was nice having no plans, no rules, and a partner in crime for a week.  It’s hard being back and having a job, responsibilities, worries.  Surprisingly I fell right into the lack of planning, where normally I worry about every unknown detail.  I was even a bit adventurous!  This kid got me to agree to fire a gun, I had oysters for the first time, I went to a Cubs game.  Hell, I even trusted him enough to ride public transportation while intoxicated!  Flying by the seat of your pants is easy when you know there is someone there 24 hours a day to back you up.  Our motto became “Come on, we’re on an adventure!” and we threw it out every time one of us balked at doing something.

Try as I might I cannot convince myself that anything in this desert is worthy of being called an adventure.  Same people, same bar, same godforsaken weather.  The nine to five, the health problems, the lack of money.  I’m hoping that this is just normal end of vacation malaise, just getting back into the routine.  Maybe it’s that I haven’t had a full night of sleep since Missouri, maybe it’s how banged up I got on this trip, or all the catch up you have to do after a vacation.  Maybe I’m just seeing my life more clearly after being able to step outside for a while.  No matter how long it takes to get over the sadness every last second of this trip was worth it.