Departure - May 30

It wasn’t quite the departure I’d hoped for. 

The last night in my own bed was disrupted at 2:00 am by raucous socializing and loud car engines in the parkinglot below my window -- very unusual for my quiet condo, and somehow of a piece with the apartment stripped bare around me.  I couldn’t really get back to sleep...

My morning was geared to 9:30 am, when my rental manager was coming by for a last check.  So I did my flurry of final tasks with an eye on the clock.  Make the bed with fresh sheets for the renters, throw out the unused food, run a last laundry, squeeze a final pack, water the plants, wash the breakfast dishes.  Then hurry my bags downstairs and pack the Miata.  I had test-fitted my cargo before, but suddenly this morning the mass didn’t fit, and the long sunny week picked this morning to rain as I struggled to close my trunk over different Tetris combinations of luggage.  It worked -- conditionally, poorly, requiring new thinking, probably culling -- but now my rental agent arrives...

I was looking forward to the hour after he left for a little quiet time to honor the moment.  But what he hadn’t told me was that the carpet cleaner, who I thought was coming tomorrow, was actually there with him today, and as the agent was leaving the man was already running hoses into the apartment, disarranging furniture, spraying the carpets.  So much for my moment.   “I thought you were just going to go,” the agent said.  So I did a last sanity check through my rooms against the noise of the pumps, and then I just went.

My first stop was an errand in town, to drop off my cable modem at the Comcast store on Westlake, and I’d been running so many errands lately that this felt like just another, though for some reason with my drone in the passenger seat.  Likewise, getting on the highway was nothing new -- here I go again, off to Centralia or wherever -- though for the moment I wasn’t sure where or for what. 

It wasn’t until I stopped in Issaquah for lunch at The Egg & Us, drank three coffees in rapid succession, ate a plate of eggs, and stared at myself in the rest room mirror that it hit me.

It’s today.  I’m going to Tierra Del Fuego. 

Oh my God.

So there are no videos of my departure (it was raining too much to set up my tripod in the parkinglot), and for dashing game-afoot photos you get only this Oh My God cellphone selfie in the rest room.  But the huevos rancheros at The Egg and Us came with fried bananas, I had a bag of cherries with me in the front seat, and the Miata was humming happily.  As I hit Ellensburg the clouds rolled away over the wide swales of pale green field, the top came down, and I turned off the highway onto the small road for Yakima. 

I’m on my way.

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P.S., in case the above isn’t clear, I’m renting my apartment furnished (the tenants, a nice post-collegiate couple, move in Thursday).  To my surprise I became obsessed with leaving them a spotless and charming apartment, with fresh pillowcases and interesting books, etc., as if I was running an AirBnb.  Hmm, maybe that’s an idea for the future...