Vacation return less than smooth sailing

It wasn't a smooth return from vacation. But is that unusual? Do any vacation returns go smoothly?

The vacation itself was great, although it was hard not to compare it to all the past vacations spent in the same area.

We used to round up the three kids and toss them into the minivan and drive out to northern California, where we slept in guest rooms and on couches. I've never lived in that area, but my family did.

Now the kids are grown up and there are fewer guest rooms and couches available. We also have an extra kid, a daughter-in-law. They all have their own jobs and commitments, so this time we flew to California and rented a minivan.

Lodging was a problem the first night. The two girls wanted to see San Francisco, so we flew out a day early. I knew a city hotel room would be expensive, but I didn't know how expensive. One night at an airport hotel cost as much as a month in my first apartment. So the oldest daughter found us a private bed and breakfast.

The homeowner was very nice, she reported, and we were given a choice between a sleeping loft and a private bedroom. It never occurred to us that to reach the private bedroom we had to walk through the sleeping loft which had been rented a group of Nicaraguan coffee growers. We had to wheel our suitcases through an obstacle course of air mattresses and back packs. I told myself I was making up for missing the youth hostel experience all those years ago as I stacked our suitcases against the door.

But the Nicaraguan coffee growers seemed much more tired than dangerous. When we left the next morning, there was a different group sleeping on the living room couches.

We spent the next few days in Santa Rosa, where my brother lives. We were there for his daughter's wedding. It was a great few days with visiting and wine tasting and a couple of nice dinners, topped off by a wedding in a redwood grove. Evidently there was also a pre-wedding bachelorette party that the kids threw without me. Hmmm.

The kids all went home that next day, but my husband and I decided to spend a couple of days in Lake Tahoe. The minivan didn't make much sense so we rented a cute little Ford Focus.

I have some unsolicited advice to anyone planning to rent more then one vehicle on a trip. This is very important advice: Get both vehicles from the same rental agency.

We drove the Hertz minivan into the Enterprise drop off area and the Enterprise people did not like it. They routed us over to one side and I walked up to the counter (and walked back to retrieve my credit card and then back to the counter again) where a very confused clerk couldn't understand why I wanted to drive my new rental backwards to the drop off area. Eventually we got the two vehicles close enough to move all our luggage and found the Hertz drop off for the minivan.

But we couldn't get the Focus out of the parking garage. The Hertz people absolutely refused to let us through their gate with an Enterprise car and that led us to an impromptu tour of a gigantic parking garage looking for an unattended exit. It was a little scary. Also impossible. There were no unattended exits in the giant rental car garage. We finally found the Enterprise exit and headed for Lake Tahoe. It was nice until we had to come home.

We knew about the traffic in the bay area so we said goodbye very early and headed out.

Three and a half hours later we were at the Oakland Airport. I left my husband with the rental car so he could go to his class reunion and I headed home. While I had little interest in his class reunion (I've met some of his high school friends), traveling home alone didn't seem like a great option either. It was a full day of traveling.

I hate air travel. It's not that I'm scared of flying, it's just that I hate it. I hate the idea that you give over all control to perfect strangers. They even get to tell you if you have to take your shoes off or not. I was surprisingly excited to find out that I didn't have to take my shoes off.

Then you have to walk to whatever gate they tell you to walk to. They never ask if you're legs are cramped from a three-hour drive in a small rental car or you're still nursing blisters from the dressy shoes you wore to last week's wedding. No, you just have to walk and you better walk fast.

Then you have to squeeze into a seat between two strangers because you didn't get a boarding pass early enough to get an aisle seat. Yep, it's your own fault.

Eventually I made it to the Tulsa airport. I know we saved some money by flying in and out of Tulsa instead of XNA, but at eight o'clock on a rainy night, I would have gladly paid the extra to land at XNA.

I was about halfway home on some dark, rainy highway (U.S. 412 near Tonitown) when I heard something hit my windshield and I just about jumped out of the driver's seat. I didn't really consider stopping. It was cold, dark and rainy and pretty lonely out there. I considered everything that could have hit my windshield and decided it must have been a bird who was just as cold and tired as I was. Funny, I didn't put the bang together with the sudden scrapping sound my windshield wipers started to make. Luckily the rain was just about over, so I shut off the wipers and kept driving. It was the next day before I realized I only had one windshield wiper.

The dogs were very happy to see me. They had been sprung from the boarder a few hours early by one of the kids and left alone in the house. They were so happy to see me, it was difficult to get myself and my luggage into the house. By the time I got inside with the excited dogs and a suitcase full of dirty laundry, it was way past my bedtime and I was way too keyed up to sleep.

Note to self: Always leave one day of vacation between returning from a trip and returning to work. Really, a couple of days to recover from vacation would be even better.

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Lynn Atkins is a Weekly Vista reporter, an occasional columnist and a sporadic blogger. The opinions expressed are those of the author.

General News on 10/26/2016