I got everything loaded up this morning and my parents picked Julie up, and then had her drive to get me and head to the Fayetteville airport. The timing worked out fairly well, and we didn’t have to wait too terribly long before we could board the plane. Then the flight was only about an hour and a half to O’Hare. From there, we took a rental car to a sandwich shop called Al & Joe’s. It was predictably complicated to order food for the four of us, but it was decent food. I had a pastrami sandwich which was heavily center-loaded and not cut all the way through. Mustard got all over my hands, so I just had to thoroughly clean up afterward.
From there, we made it to Tru by Hilton, which seemed like a small, “trendy” hotel. They had a pool table in the lobby, so after a little bit of rest and then fighting over who would talk to whom about when to go where and what to eat, Dad and I went down to play. We were both pretty equally bad, but it was fun. Then we ended up going to Thomas’s house to gather for dinner.
It was great to see the cousins we hardly knew, and meet all of their partners or otherwise. Brandan spent most of the time grilling burgers while the ladies got everything else ready. We really didn’t want to make anyone host, and had hoped to take them out to eat, but after two events in such a short period, maybe this is just how it goes. All I have to say is that people had better expect a potluck for our parents, because we’re not hosting a bunch of judgmental family in our time of grief.
We had a reasonably good time in spite of the added stress, and hopefully this weekend we’ll have some time for fun. It sounds like nobody really expected us to be around for this long though, so we’ll just see what happens.
I think we were pretty much the last ones out of the house, and we made it back to the hotel reasonably quickly. Julie and I stayed up chatting for quite a while, which turned a 10-minute blogging routine into a two hour ordeal. We’ll be up early for breakfast and a funeral tomorrow, so hopefully the bed will be comfortable, but not so comfortable that I won’t be able to get up in the morning.
One, big, happy.