Holiday Inn Express Hotel and Suites Harrisburg

there's something to be said for just accepting what is

We decided I would leave Sunday midday, breaking the drive up into two parts that way, because on the way down I’d said I didn’t want to drive in the dark but then once it was dark I was only two hours from Penland and I didn’t want to stop so close, so I kept driving, but it didn’t feel safe, or good, and P told me later that he’d been really worried. He never lets on when he’s worried, which is a big difference between us. When I have a passing scary thought I latch on to it, worry it to death, wonder about it, look at it from all angles, try to prepare for when it happens, etc. When he has an actual scary thought he glosses over it, lets it flow through him, lets it pass. I think we’re both right probably. We decided that my getting into a crash was a scary enough thought for both of us that  I just wouldn’t drive in the dark, but then I started doing this thing I do where I negotiate something once it’s already been decided, so I said, well, maybe I could drive in the dark a bit on this end just to get a little closer to home, and then he said, you know, maybe we should change plans entirely and stay another night and then leave really early tomorrow morning and make it back in one shot, Google Maps telling us it would take ten and a half hours. 

We woke up at 6am and he drove us to Penland in the dark and then we said goodbye and I got on the road with a cattle dog named Boo. This time I didn’t stop as much as I had on the way down, only twice to get coffee and twice to walk her, though she seemed to be on some kind of potty strike. I’d put her dog bed in the back and so while she usually likes to ride up front right next to me she climbed into the back and just lay down and snoozed, surrounded by the detritus of our days. 

By 5:30 I’d been on the road for eleven hour and was still, according to Google Maps, three and a half hours away from home. Sunset was at 6:22 but I’d googled when it actually gets dark, and it’s something like 100 minutes after sunset, so I figured I had until 8-ish. Except then Google Maps put me getting home at 8:20, and then 8:45, which I figured was only twenty minutes past dark, what could happen, etc, and here I was, once again negotiating the boundaries, trying to convince myself that a thing we’d decided wasn’t okay would be okay. I called P to ask for help sticking to our plan, which had been that I would pull over once it started getting dark, and he didn’t pick up but even just having called kind of did something for me. I saw a sign for a Holiday Inn Express and figured I’d pull into the parking lot just to figure out where I’d want to stay, and even though it wasn’t even sunset yet I started having a hard time differentiating road from other road. That’s what happens in the dark. It’s not that I can’t see, not exactly, it’s that my brain doesn’t know how to categorize what it’s seeing, and it doesn’t know how far away anything is. I almost got hit on the Brooklyn Bridge coming over because I thought a truck was really far away when it wasn’t. So once I parked I realized I couldn’t drive anymore and I booked a hotel room and then tried to walk to the grocery store across the street but couldn’t, because I was still in the super car-centric part of the country, so I drove in the dark to the grocery store and couldn’t see anything, drove to the Taco Bell across the street and couldn’t see anything, drove back to the Holiday Inn Express, sure that the evening would be long and lonely, that I would feel trapped and miss P too much, but instead it just sort of flew by. I had my soft tacos with diablo sauce and went to a meeting and then Boo and I fell asleep and then we woke up at 6:30 and got back on the road and I got home by eleven. 

I’m exhausted and haven’t unpacked and wish I had a day between vacation and back to work, but I’m proud of myself for actually taking a vacation. I used to be so afraid of time off that I actually found it intolerable. I remember when I was planning my honeymoon everyone told me I shouldn’t take my laptop but I couldn’t figure out what I would do if I didn’t have work to do, so I worked on my honeymoon, and that was fine, then, because everything I decided to do was fine. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been missing P until I was with him for a week and I got everything I wanted and needed, and now I just have two more weeks until he’s back, and then we will see. I don’t want to accept that I can’t drive in the dark anymore because I’m only thirty-nine, and I thought it took a lot longer than that for people to have to stop driving in the dark, but there’s something to be said for just accepting what is. I have often found myself in situations where I can’t see something but am so convinced I can that I get myself into trouble — how much easier, how much gentler, to just pull over. 

Holiday Inn Express Hotel and Suites is at 2055 Technology Pkwy, Mechanicsburg, PA.