The morning after

I love traveling. I love road trips. But the end of them is rough for me.

I'll have a full rundown of the trip probably tonight, and I had an amazing time. But yesterday involved a ten-hour drive after not getting enough sleep all weekend. It was a long way to go, and taking that route through Pennsylvania and Ohio only has service centers, where you get a gas station, convenience area and a few fast food places, and then continue on towards the next one. There's no detours to take or cool little rest stops to take a load off, so it's just a lot of driving towards the same thing, which adds to the tiring. Plus I stayed up too late again last night because I had to watch The Bachelorette.

So this inning really hurts in a way that ten hours of driving back from Nashville didn't. I'm having some sort of allergic reaction to something- I thought maybe it was the detergent they used at the last hotel, but after this long I think it's something else. Either way I have spent my entire morning itching. I subsisted mostly on coffee on the road (I only drink water at meals but it did not balance out this time) so I'm dehydrated and headachey. I'm tired. I'm still mad about things that happened on Friday at work so I'm irritated just being here. A smart person might take the day off after a trip like I just did, but that's wasting time off I could spend on another trip later, and so I'll soldier on.

And I told myself that I have a break from trip planning, that I can relax... And I've spent plenty of time since I got back looking up things to do on the next road trip.