Just a short three day drive across country

After 5 months of hospitality from one set of my parents, we felt like we had overstayed our welcome… especially since we realistically still didn’t have an exit strategy to get back to China. One idea had been to stay with my other set of parents, but my mom and stepdad were getting their house ready to sell (and despite their insisitence that it wouldn’t impact them, it would have) and Mark’s parents couldn’t accomodate us either and then my amazing Aunt came to the rescue. She had a condo in Houston, Texas that was unoccupied and we could use it until we could head home.

So we rented a van, packed up the surprising amount of stuff we managed to accumulate in 5 months (including a not horde-y amount of toilet paper, but not un horde-y either) and drove to Houston. For those of you not familar with the geography of the American Southeast…Florida goes on forever. We drove for 9 hours and we were still in Florida. My goal had been to make it through Florida and stop across the state lines the first day, unfortunately due to traffic and really terrible storms- we only made it to Pennsacola, Fl before having to call it for the night.

We stopped and had Texas Roadhouse for dinner and we were honestly disappointed, the Texas Roadhouse in Shanghai is much better than what we had in Florida. Alex made the comment that “you have to go all the way to Shanghai to get authentic Texas roadhouse!” They were out of baked potatoes, and something else that we wanted, the chili came out cold… and they were super swamped so the servers were running around with no time. After that it was over to the hotel and a rest before getting up and moving on through Mississippi and Louisiana. If we had more time, and the situation was different I would have liked to do more exploring in both of those- I’ve never been to either before.

Honestly, I love a roadtrip, it’s one of my favorite ways to travel and see the country while you go. Mark is less of a road warrior, and Alex is enjoying it less and less as he gets older, but it still makes me happy.

As much as I enjoy roadtrips, the anxiety about stopping in hotels, restaurants, and gas stations along the way was definitely a downer. I had hand sanitizer that we used constantly, plus wipes, and still washing our hands whenever available. It was geniunely such a bizarre experience that I didn’t even do our traditional things of taking pictures at welcome to the state signs- I thought the more we isolated in the car the less likely we were to be exposed to someone with covid.

Mark found podcasts to listen to the whole way, so we listened to a lot of Radio Lab, and another one called Lore. Those were my favorite of the ones he picked and the ones I don’t mind spending hours listening too, although I’m more of a blare music type of driver. We learned about tick bites and meat allergies, ranked voting in Ireland, and all kinds of mythology on monsters.

The storms followed us all the way to Houston, so we had bad weather and slow going the whole way. The rain was so intense that it took us an extra couple of hours to get out of Florida and a fairly terrifying drive on bridge overpass roads through Mississippi.

In addition, we had a scare or two about covid- namely that we had to drive through New Orleans on our way, and Texas annouced they were going to block anyone who had been in New Orleans from entering. So instead of stopping for dinner there, we ate fast food in the car, which no one enjoyed. All in all, while it wasn’t the family roadtrip from the movies, we made it in one peice and when we got there, my Aunts were there to meet us and help us move in the condo. It was so good to see them, my cousin’s wedding was the last thing we did right before moving to China, and I hadn’t been able to see them since then.

I know I’ve said this before and will again, but we are so lucky to have such wonderful family and friends who were willing to help us out in a very weird time in our lives.