So, I woke up Christmas morning, not with the childish excitement for gifts and candy, but with excitement for finally heading back down to Mexico, my winter home. I woke up before sunrise and flipped on the back porch light, a little worried about the predicted weather. What I saw was even worse than what I'd expected: Freezing rain hurling itself down onto the already partially-flooded lawns. Deciding I couldn't control the weather but I could control whether to remain calm or not, I got into the shower, almost hoping the weather would just go away. After I got out, I quickly checked the Megabus and Amtrak websites to see if they advertised any delays or cancellations. None. I checked the weather and saw a big blotch of storm stretching basically from where I was sitting over to Chicago and down the whole train route that was to take us to Texas. Lovely.
My family reluctantly drove me to Ann Arbor anyway and I waited to board the bus with other Christmas Day travelers in the rain. After about 20 minutes, the sun came out and we actually got into Chicago early. Whew!
There I found Ms. Abigail waiting with a huge bag of food and we were both relieved that we'd both made it. The train ride down was nice, though the train was packed with folks who'd had their flights cancelled and had to make other holiday travel plans. There was also the part where we were woken up at 2am, told we'd be getting off the train to get on a bus, actually got off the train at 4am and onto the bus and later back onto a train sometime around 7am. All of this happened somewhere in Arkansas, some place I'd probably never recognize.
We finally made it to Texas and were happy because weeks before we'd made the decision to couchsurf with someone to have a little break in the trip down. Imagine how happy we were when we called our couchsurfer and she informed us that she was not, in fact, in San Antonio, Texas, but in Las Vegas at a huge party. We did some quick thinking and within an hour another couchsurfer picked us up and took us to a (couchsurfing) party of our own. We were exhausted, but managed to keep up.
The next day we left bright and early (ok we almost missed our bus) for Mexico! More to come.
