It takes thirty-one hours to drive straight through from Houston, Texas to Liberty Lake, Washington without stopping. And for some reason, I was crazy enough to try and make this drive by myself. A week before I had graduated from college with my Bachelor's degree and broken up with my girlfriend of two years on the same night. She moved out of my apartment a few days later and I discovered that I couldn't really handle being in the apartment by myself. After a few days of toughing it out, trying to distract myself to keep from texting her, I called up an old friend of mine, Derek, that had graduated a year before me and moved all the way up to Washington state.
I called him up, told him what was going on, and he asked if I wanted to come up and hang out at his place for a week or two. Of course my initial response was, "No, that's way too far to drive and I don't want to buy a plane ticket," but after we hung up I couldn't get the thought out of my head. I travel quite a bit and by that time I had been to about twenty-five states. Driving up to Washington would not only put me over the halfway point, but I'd get to mark off Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho as well. The farthest north I had been at that point was Boulder, Colorado.
The longest trip I had been on was when I visited San Diego, and I had broken the trip into two days by staying overnight in Phoenix. It had been months since I'd gone on a road trip, and by the next morning I was itching to jump in my car and just drive. I somehow convinced myself that the best way to get over the breakup was to go spend over thirty hours in a car by myself. I ended up calling Derek pretty early the next morning. He told me that the temperature was in the 70s that morning and probably wouldn't get above the eighties. It was already in the 90s in Houston and steadily climbing and that's all I needed to push me over the edge. It took me about fifteen minutes to pack up everything I would need (I'm a very light traveler). I pulled up a map on my phone and started plotting out my stops. It's impossible to completely plan a road trip, especially one this long, but I could at least lay out a skeleton of a plan.
I figured that if I was serious about it, I could make the trip in three days. It was only nine when I left, so if I drove up an hour and a half north of Amarillo to Dalhart, a city I had stayed in a few times before, that would put me about a third of the way there. And yes, it does take more than ten hours to drive from the south east corner of Texas to the northwest; that state is enormous.
When I drove through Dallas I was feeling great. That "I just started a new adventure" feeling was alive and well within me. But a few hours after passing through Dallas I felt the weight of all the drama from the week before start to catch up with me. It really doesn't help that most of northwest Texas is all the same thing. Fields, shrubs, cows, oh wow that field has goats in it, oh wait those are just really small cows. I tried calling my brother around five that evening just to have someone to talk to, but he was out on a date with his wife and was clearly not happy to have his kid brother interrupting it. I called Derek and we were able to kill an hour but then he had to leave to go do something with his wife. I called my mom next and she talked to me for about half an hour about her last doctor's appointment before I decided that driving in silence was better than hearing about her gout.
Hearing Derek and my brother talking about their wives did nothing to help ease the wound from a week ago. I found myself scrolling through my contacts and stopping on my ex's name a few times before I finally selected it and then deleted it. We had been on again off again for the last year and I was determined to make it stick this time. Mostly because this time I was the one who initiated the breakup. And wouldn't she find it hilarious for me to call up like, "Can we talk?"
When I drove past Amarillo I was relieved to be close to my stopping point. But, then when I got to the exit for Dahart, I didn't take it. Some internal force was pushing me, telling me that I had to get out of Texas, in fact I wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
