Chris had arranged for a bed-like piece of furniture for each of Mike, John, and myself and after an extended nap, the fourth such time that proper sleep had been skipped, the party made palaver before getting lunch at TGI Friday’s and then returned to Chris’s to talk.  This may sound reductive saying “we just talked” but it isn’t.  Chris, Mike, John, and I have all chosen to do life retoolings and at least Chris, Mike, and I have maintained contact as we go through our quarterlife crises.  I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek as it’s often difficult to tease out whether one is answering questions late for one’s youth or early for one’s adulthood and none of us are arrogant enough to say we’re “ahead of the curve”.  Chris and Christine are comfortable sharing their questions and answers with strangers and I see this as a type of intimacy that’s new to modernity.  Thanks for the iPhone 4 dev book, Chris and my apologies for having no pictures for this day.

The unwinding continued as we drove across Maryland to drop off John.  West Virginia and Maryland can be annoyingly long states but winding through the Allegheny Mountains seemed nicer than usual.  We were hit by short bouts of rain that were annoying but creating a beautiful fog as evapotranspiration met the setting sun.  This view and morning in Oklahoma were probably the two most beautiful natural sights from trip and I should have asked the car to pull over so I could take pictures.  I’ll lie to myself and say there’s more aesthetics in the ephemeral.

John was home before midnight and Mike and I started looking for a gas station that was still open.  Salvation was found at a Wawa, the great harbinger of the expanding power of the mid-Atlantic.  Mike and I made it back to my house a little after 2 AM, around 210 hours from when we left with a net displacement of 0 mi.  In those terms, it doesn’t seem like we were gone that long at all.