East Coast Road Trip, Introduction
I haven't done many real vacations since my childhood. My family did a lot of them: visiting my uncle's family near San Francisco; going to a bunch of different national parks and reservations throughout the Empty Quarter and Southwest; trips to the mountains in Virginia; trips to St. Augustine, FL; the one or two times we visited my grandfather in St. Petersburg, FL; I remember a trip to Memphis and the area around there.
Then I got to college, and the summers and winters were either times that I worked (for a couple of years that was in Washington, DC, at the Naval Research Lab, then I had Exegetics, then VirPack). I took one weekend trip to Myrtle Beach with folks sometime after college. Origins has been a constant, but it, with perhaps the exception of the first year, has been a working experience, where the work has been more important to me than the convention. (One of the reasons I didn't go back this year was that, without the Lab to take care of, I honestly wasn't sure what'd I'd do with myself for five days.)
But, with my step-grandfather sitting on death's door, with no indication of when he'd finally go through, I had cause to consider a trip south that I didn't really want to make. Then it became a matter of trying to find a way to make the idea as palatable as possible. When I still interacted with Karen, she felt like the sort of person who *could* be there for me, but probably not someone who *would* be.
Somehow, with a great deal of stubborn cajoling (that I always felt vaguely guilty about), I convinced Zora, who I have "known online" (a phrase that carries a horrible connotation that certainly feels wrong here) for over eight years, to come take a trip down the east coast with me.
Originally, the plan went all the way from Boston to Miami; when we finally entered the land of "making plans" from the land of "you're crazy", that was trimmed to just a dip into North Carolina, cutting out a couple of days and a whole lot of driving.
Then I got to college, and the summers and winters were either times that I worked (for a couple of years that was in Washington, DC, at the Naval Research Lab, then I had Exegetics, then VirPack). I took one weekend trip to Myrtle Beach with folks sometime after college. Origins has been a constant, but it, with perhaps the exception of the first year, has been a working experience, where the work has been more important to me than the convention. (One of the reasons I didn't go back this year was that, without the Lab to take care of, I honestly wasn't sure what'd I'd do with myself for five days.)
But, with my step-grandfather sitting on death's door, with no indication of when he'd finally go through, I had cause to consider a trip south that I didn't really want to make. Then it became a matter of trying to find a way to make the idea as palatable as possible. When I still interacted with Karen, she felt like the sort of person who *could* be there for me, but probably not someone who *would* be.
Somehow, with a great deal of stubborn cajoling (that I always felt vaguely guilty about), I convinced Zora, who I have "known online" (a phrase that carries a horrible connotation that certainly feels wrong here) for over eight years, to come take a trip down the east coast with me.
Originally, the plan went all the way from Boston to Miami; when we finally entered the land of "making plans" from the land of "you're crazy", that was trimmed to just a dip into North Carolina, cutting out a couple of days and a whole lot of driving.