My journey home to Iowa started out wrong, so I should have known better. I left three and a half hours later than planned, making it 11 o’clock at night when I finally hit the pavement. Why didn’t I just wait for morning, I ask myself now.
You know how they say that everything goes wrong when your spouse deploys? They weren’t lying.
In the first three hours of my trip, I was pulled over for the first time and the second time of my life, once for no tag light (the light that illuminates the license plate, I learned) and the second time for driving suspiciously slow through town while looking for a hotel to crash at (my tired body, not my car).
On top of that, I ended up getting sick, then my dog ended up getting sick, then I ended up getting sick while cleaning up the result of my dog getting sick in the backseat of my car.
So after convincing the second police officer that I really wasn’t drunk, just lost, physically ill and extremely disoriented — after explaining to him that the Xbox in the trunk was a gift and I wasn’t hauling narcotics — I finally gave up in Dublin, a mere two and a half hours from where I started.
If this trip taught me anything, it was how much I truly undervalue my husband. And as I cleaned up my dog’s third mess of the night from the hotel floor, one thought played on repeat in my mind: I miss him.
You know how they say that everything goes wrong when your spouse deploys? They weren’t lying.
In the first three hours of my trip, I was pulled over for the first time and the second time of my life, once for no tag light (the light that illuminates the license plate, I learned) and the second time for driving suspiciously slow through town while looking for a hotel to crash at (my tired body, not my car).
On top of that, I ended up getting sick, then my dog ended up getting sick, then I ended up getting sick while cleaning up the result of my dog getting sick in the backseat of my car.
So after convincing the second police officer that I really wasn’t drunk, just lost, physically ill and extremely disoriented — after explaining to him that the Xbox in the trunk was a gift and I wasn’t hauling narcotics — I finally gave up in Dublin, a mere two and a half hours from where I started.
If this trip taught me anything, it was how much I truly undervalue my husband. And as I cleaned up my dog’s third mess of the night from the hotel floor, one thought played on repeat in my mind: I miss him.