1. Today, late in the afternoon, we turned in the keys to our apartment home. Shortly after four o'clock, I finished giving the living room and dining area one last vacuuming. The apartment sat empty and clean. I took a few minutes to appreciate what a great place this has been: quiet, maintained expertly and efficiently, compact, convenient to the Deke's job, a great location for me to launch various forays into the DC metropolitan area and we were only about a half an hour from the BWI airport; we hosted about a dozen or more visitors in the room furnished for the grandchildren to have overnights with us; we had easy access to the large grassy area behind the building so we could readily take Maggie and Charly out to do their business. I turned the small kitchen into a cooking lab and had a great time extending my boundaries of fixing different foods.
I'm hard pressed to come up with a living situation I enjoyed more. This unspectacular little apartment helped make these three years living in Greenbelt, MD three of the best years of my life.
2. Getting to the point where I could muse about how much I loved this place required another full day of work. We shipped a bunch of parcels to Kellogg. The Deke and Molly made deliveries to Dora Kennedy School and to University Christian Church. We packed the dog crate in the Sube so the dogs will have a comfortable ride. The day turned soupy with humidity. Carting boxes to the car, odds and ends to the dumpster, and doing our final packing wore me out so much that when we went to Quench to relax, I was too hot and tired to drink beer. I enjoyed a single pour of Green Hat Gin and then switched to Coke and drank a couple of cans over ice with lime. I rarely drink pop anymore. Today Coke was perfect. It was the real thing.
3. Back at the Diazes, we unloaded much of our stuff from the car and I headed straight to the basement to further cool off and to lie down and relax. I took some time to chart out an itinerary for the next few days. I think it'll go something like this:
Saturday: drive to Elryia, Ohio.
Sunday: drive to La Crosse, WI
Monday: drive to Bismark, ND
Tuesday: drive to Bozeman, MT
Wednesday: drive to Kellogg, ID
We don't have to rush and I think we can do each of these segments during the day.
Now, on two different occasions, the Deke and I have pushed ourselves and driven from Bismark to Kellogg in a single day.
We were younger then.
And we hadn't just spent day after day sorting, packing, and hauling.
I'd prefer shorter days of driving and giving ourselves plenty of rest.
But, we'll see......
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