Oh, I Can Wait to Be Home Again

 

Part of the experience of owning a second home is the logistics of getting from here to there. As much as we may pretend that it is just a hope, skip, and a jump, the fact of it is that we live a good 4 hours away from our second home on a good day, and on a bad day, or rather a usual traffic day, it easily telescopes to 5 or 6 hours away. Times two, a weekend trip ensures a jail sentence of 8 to 12 hours in a car, or in other words, an entire day devoted to driving.

 

The effect of all this driving is manifest on our speedometer and our gas receipts. It is also steadily apparent in our state of mind, or state of disposition by the time we arrive at either end. The getting-there portion of the journey is fueled with the energy of anticipation and release: Let’s go! We’re off! Woo hoo, the week is over! The return journey, like all decompressions back to reality is the reverse mirroring of the same: “Let’s go! OMG, it’s backed up for 45 miles! The week end is over!”

 

The subsequent depression is amusing if you are not the one mired in it, and equally annoying if you are not the one mired in it. In short, coming home is the bastion of getting away and we have tried to resolve this “first world” situation by remaining hyper vigilant of the other person’s moods, albeit while receiving the same observations from the other about our own.

 

This hyper vigilance extends to both the morning of, the trip, and the evening after. From past experience, we have resolved our issues into a list of do’s and don’ts. I shall share these with you so you may apply them to your own situations, however, more intense or less than our own travels. They are as equally apt for reimmersion back from two hours at the movies, a day at the beach, or return from an around the world cruise, excepting the difference of the mounds of laundry being more or less relative according to the duration of the escape.

 

Got that formula?

 

• No recriminations are allowed for the amount of money spent, as in “do you know how much this New York Times cost and you littered the car with the pieces and I haven’t even read it”. Also included is statements along the line of,  “I can’t believe we spent that much on a stinking dinner at a place that thinks that stinking ginger is an ingredient in lobster carbonara.”
• All dietic license stops at the bridge: no french fries, taffy, fudge, or rosemary salted shortbread cookies may be brought back, unless they are gifts and in which case they must be wrapped in such a way as to make it apparent if someone tries to sample them and to prevent that, they must be either in the car top or buried in the dirty laundry (in a plastic bag!) in the biggest suitcase in the trunk.
• No one person should bear the brunt of the entire return driving, for that prevents that person from holding the Ace of Complaints, which is unfair to the person who slept the whole way home but still has to figure out how to wear out the dogs who are very restless after 5 hours in the back of an SUV and are intent on tearing up every sofa pillow in the house.
• Whatever guilt a parent feels over abandoning the working teenager for the weekend, no wallets will be produced for guilt trips to American Eagle or the Apple Store, at least until Wednesday when good sense and work exhaustion sharpens the senses softened by salt water and fudge.
• No bills  may be paid on Sunday night, regardless of whether they are about to turn off the electricity. Bills can wait until Monday night when the  grinding of workday has already numbed the senses. This is probably the most important rule of the journey as it prevents temper tantrums, crying, screaming, and the flinging of envelopes about the bedroom whilst the other partner locks themselves in the spare room until the storm subsides.
• Bring home no dirty laundry.  This is not a metaphor. I mean do not bring home any dirty clothes. Wash them in the washer/dryer that is right on the first floor instead of the one here that is in the bowels of the horribly messy, humid, moldy basement where spiders live.
• Lastly, no matter how loudly and vociferously your partner declares that We.    Will.  Never.  Do. This. Trip. For.  The. Weekend. Again!, you can be assured that the partner will be the very same one to call the other at work by Wednesday and say, “What time are we leaving on Friday night?” ”

 

P.S.    These are all the points I had written, until I returned home and now I will add a final one:

 

• Never, ever walk into your house after a weekend away with your arms full of a laptop, purse, dragging a rolling suitcase, and with a shopping bag full of purchases which include two garlic and cheese baguettes (note the infraction of food rule above = chaos), unless you don’t mind sprawling face first on the tiled steps on top of your laptop when you trip over two dogs wagging their tails to greet you while one buries his head in the bag and takes off with the parmesan baguettes while you thrust your hand out to steady yourself, knock over an oak table holding up a pottery dish that somehow lands on top of you.

 

 

Tequila, anyone?