Kimberly here. I suppose we should tell you what the last couple of days have been like. Yesterday I woke up to pouring rains. And as June recently alluded to, rain in a mobile home has the effect of being sheltered somewhere midway between a brick townhome and a pup tent. With metal walls and roof, closer to the pup tent in bad weather. The night before I’d awoken to winds so high I was making mental note for the umpteenth time how grateful I was that Bill was safely in a hotel room in Casper, WY. At this point, my mind wandered to how we were going to get the man home. When he was ready, of course.
Not wanting to influence in any way the meditative needs of my wandering husband, I set out to discover the various choices we’d have, at some point. I’d offered to drive up the 12 hours on Interstate 25 to pick him up but kept going over and over in my mind just where I would leave our dog Oliver, who recently - perhaps because of master-missing-stress has been particularly barky. I’d had fun thoughts of just him jumping in the car with me and us being off on a joy ride only to remember how after about an hour he becomes a bit nervous and then starts pacing amongst the front to back seat. It’s not like in the movies folks.
And just so you needn’t think Oliver holds all the blame for me not wanting to drive, everyone who knows me very well, knows that I have a very particular aversion to driving long distances. I have done it, but not happily. Four days on the road and it not being any sort of vacation sounded a bit like hell, even if my long-lost husband would be with me half the time. So by now in my imaginings, it being 4:30 am or so, I popped out of bed to explore other options.
Now just to bring you up to speed, as I’ve seen that not too many of you had viewed the blog post that mentions the x-ray taken at the chiropractor’s office in Billings, MT, of the disturbing disintegrating back discs and the prognosis of too-swollen-for-biking-across-the-country-let-alone-walk-across-the-room swollen nerves around said vertebrae. Nerves that had been agitated by the uphill bike pushing of the first days of heading out of Seattle into mentally challenging snow-covered mountains. You can catch up on that event here. So the ability to continue on, even to the fairly flat Cowboy trail had been decidedly unwise from exiting the doctor’s office, but you know, these things take a while to digest. He had acquired a cane at least.
So back to yesterday, as I early morning surfed the internet, I saw his travel options luckily were somewhat equally cost-effective to me driving up. Planes, buses and cars each having their own extending costs. But at least there were options. About 7 am or so I saw that Bill was on Facebook and called him. Turns out he’d had a very rough night and actually felt sick, achy, headachy A ‘head cold’ he said. Oh my. Trying to be casual about my desire to have him come home immediately - of course, only he would determine the end date of this adventure - I gave him the options I’d discovered and as I did, he seemed more and more open to letting the date move from end-of-month to an unspoken ASAP. His head cold was probably talking but timing is everything. Soon we had arrived at him setting off for home Tuesday of next week. After a bus layover in Denver (final nice hotel stay included), Bill will pull into ABQ, his bike in one more box, on Wednesday night, all things working well.
I did call him this morning only to find him out on a walk, so that’s a good thing. Cane accompanied but head cold better and leg feeling better too. I asked him again if coming home still felt good. He assured me he’d ‘emptied the tank’, whatever that means, perhaps only he will ever know.
