Toward home
The trip isn't over yet! I have to share a little of the voyage back. I don't remember what time we got to bed, but we planned to get up at 5am and get on the road either when we were ready, or 6am, whichever came first. At about 5:30 we were close to ready, and Micky offered to go down and start cleaning off the car. Well, actually step one was to determine which white drift was our car, and step two was to begin cleaning it off. The rental agency had helpfully provided us with an ice scraper about the size of a Q-tip. Micky's mittens had never turned up, so I loaned her my gloves (my regular, winter gloves, not my show gloves - but you knew that) and she cleaned off the car with her hands for the most part. When we got downstairs with our luggage, we helped her. It was a job - the snow storm might not have started out big time, but we got at least a foot of new snow, and it was still coming down very lightly.
The hardest part of the whole production was getting the car out of its parking space, since plows had done a job on the parking lot, and we didn't have anything but our hands and feet to use to clear a path behind the tires. It wasn't that bad though, and with one person behind the wheel and everyone else pushing, we did it. It was easier after we took the emergency brake off. Whoops. I left it on the night before and I'm apparently the only person who does that. My bad!
Karen checked us out, and Micky made one last stop at the hotel desk to check on road conditions. We had chains in the trunk, also provided by the rental agency, but they weren't required, so we settled the California girls in the back seat and took off - slowly! Kim had added me onto her rental agreement as an additional driver on Friday before we left Reno, partly because I'm more used to driving in snow, but also just to break up the driving, so it was definitely my turn to drive back to Reno on the snow-packed road. It took two and a half hours to drive what had been a one-hour trip on the way to Tahoe, but we were fine and I don't think I freaked anyone out. That's what they've been telling me to my face, anyway! After a few miles out of Tahoe, it wasn't even snowing any more.
We returned the rental car and took the shuttle (a much better and more timely shuttle) back to the airport. Once there I realized that to correspond with Micky's missing mittens, I had left my gloves in the rental car! Micky gave them back to me and I put them on the seat where I could conveniently forget to pick them back up. So anyone who rents a white... something... (what was that car, Kim?) in Reno, if you find a pair of gray Isotoner gloves, they're mine but just keep them. You'll need them to clean the snow off the car.
I went to check in at my airline, and Kim and Karen went to check in at theirs. Micky's flight was later in the day, and she went over with them. When the nice people at America West finished hand-searching my checked bag, I went over to where Micky and Karen were standing... talking to Glen! The band was lugging their way through the check-in line, and George came over to talk to us for a minute too; said thanks for coming to the show, as he always does!
We said our goodbyes, and I went to my gate. I had one last Styx-related incident while going through the security checkpoint. As the woman was manually checking my bag (do we see a pattern here? I always know my stuff has gotten into the x-ray machine when I hear someone yell, "BAG CHECK!"), I was talking to her about all the stuff in my bag. I'm always trying to find out what triggers the bag check, without actually asking, "What can I do to make you let me get through security without you bothering me?" She was telling me that the batteries in my camera bag were part of it. Then she picked up the pewter Styx keychain on my car keys, which was upside down to her, and started to say, "And something like this, in the x-ray machine, looks like-" but then she stopped, because she turned it over and said, "Oh, Styx! Wow, I have their Cornerstone album." I told her they had just played in Tahoe and were all over in Concourse B waiting to fly to LAX! She was quite impressed!
Fourteen hours and three flights later (we won't talk about how narrowly I escaped having to take four planes to get back home to the middle of nowhere), I was finally home. As we walked in the door, my husband asked me, "So, is this the last trip for 2002?" For 2002? Yeah... I guess.
Come on 2003!!