I didn’t make this vacation easy on myself. Besides starting to lead a team not two weeks before leaving, I also was finishing up career reviews for my advisees at work. And those reviews had to be delivered Monday - the day that I left.
So I cleared my calendar and had one breakfast and two lunch meetings - plenty of food to start the trip off with. Afterwards, I went home and met Alisa for the drive to airport. Except that I had forgotten a key for my coworker and dogsitter Alex to pick up Ellie, so we had to swing by work one more time.
The airport parking shuttle took about ten minutes to swing by to pick us up - during which we attempted to stay in the shade, but the humidity and heat index still caused us to sweat.
Because we were flying super basic economy, but also because I had a United card, we couldn’t carry on a large bag, but we could check one. Done.
We found the Turkish Airlines lounge as the only open lounge at Dulles, and we ate cheese and drank wine while we waited.
The plane was delayed leaving and arriving in Vegas, so we tried to optimize once we got to the airport by sending Alisa after the bags and me after the rental car. Cars in Vegas are expensive, so I went with Fox Rentals. When I searched for it in Google Maps, it only had 1.5 stars.
The two shuttles to get there lined up ok, just each took another ten minutes to get farther from the airport. Once I made it to the front of the not long but very slow line, the customer service rep spent another ten minutes bouncing between two computers to get the agreement for the car.
I was given a choice of three on the lot, and I chose the one that had a USB outlet that I could see. It also had a lot of stains on the seats...
I picked up Alisa and the luggage. I was hoping we could get a little further down the road before food, but the delays (and the lack of any substantial towns along our route) meant we stopped at Tacos and Beer and got nachos. I tried jackfruit for the first time - awesome but weird but awesome. Just like pulled meat.
And with that, we were on the road. We chatted for the first hour, then the dreariness set in. The second hour was a lot of twitching to stay awake and singing along to whatever we had downloaded (because internet wasn’t easy to come by). The three hour drive put us along the Arizona/Utah border, so we jumped in and out a few times before settling in to Utah - which has time an hour different than Arizona where our canyon adventure tomorrow was.
We pulled up to Aiken’s Lodge at 2am (which was at least 4am DC time), and fell out of the car into our room. The AC in the back was so loud, I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I turned on ours for an additional cacophony of white noise and promptly passed out.
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