In the beginning... Day 7: Excellent Perserverance

This is not working out as well as I had originally planned. Only three out of seven days have produced a blog post. I had such grand intentions. Oh well. What this means is that now everyone will be a recipient of one huge post instead of many smaller ones. If you are interested though, I have many very good excuses, very good. See, I have been spending my time either with family that I haven’t seen in years, or on the road. Neither of those places is conducive to writing. Even now, I am only able to post this message because I am staying with my Aunt and Uncle in Pennsylvania and they have gone to sleep. It is 11 pm Sunday night and seeing that I took a nap this afternoon (it was wonderful) I am all full of energy. You may be asking yourself how I made it all the way from Montana to Pennsylvania. Let me tell you!

I left MT relatively early on Thursday. The plan was to get somewhere into Minnesota and stay the night. Then I would pull into Eau Claire, WI early on Friday and spend the night with my great Aunts and Uncles. Unusually, that plan happened. I drove across the states of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and then Wisconsin. I can tell you that I went through No Where, because on Thursday I was in the middle of it. Wow, there is a whole lot of nothing out there. Ironically, it is still beautiful. I kept thinking back to Iraq. Iraq had a whole lot of nothing too, but it was ugly. Doubting myself, however, my opinion might have something to do with my innate bias for the USA, but I would venture that there are thousands of other people that feel the same way, they are all service men like myself, but hey. In driving that day, I had some good times and not so good times. There isn’t much to say about 14 hours of monotonous driving, but near the end of the day, actually in Wheaton, MN, my wonderful sister called. She needed help putting pictures up on her blog, http://tiffanyhightower.blogspot.com/. I didn’t know how, as you may have guessed with the evidence being the pictureless blog you are reading now, but I did my best to help. We talked for a bit and just then, for some unknown reason, I started to feel lonely. I think it has to do with talking to Tiff. She and I are best friends and I probably open up to her more than anyone else in the world. Well, there are certainly things I don’t tell her, but those are probably things that no one but a select group of guys knows, and those guys don’t know things she knows. What I am trying to say is that no one knows everything about me, but everything about me is known by someone.

I was telling Tiff that I was lonely. Driving in the middle of no where, thousands of miles from anyone I knew, I was lonely. There was a point that I almost turned my car around and drove back to Seattle. I was ready to give up traveling, settle down, get a job, buy a house, get married, and live the rest of my life boringly serving God with great joy and passion, not bored but boringly as Mark Driscoll said in a sermon on I Timothy. Obviously I didn’t. The only thing that kept me from turning the car was my commitment to YL in Germany.

It was late when I got off the phone with Tiff so my next goal was finding a place to sleep. I had decided that I would splurge and get a hotel. Normally my car is more than sufficient, but old age is getting to me so I wimped out. It was freakin cold outside! Think about it, Minnesota in March. I vote yes, cold! It worked out great because Thursday night, UW was playing ASU in the Quarter Finals of the Pac-10 Tournament. I turned the game on with 3:26 left in OT. UW went on to win the game, beat Stanford in the Semis and Arizona in the finals to win the Pac-10 title for the first time ever and also grab a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament. Amazing, UW a #1 seed. Who would have ever thought I would have seen that in my lifetime? Going all the way baby, I only wish Illinois wasn’t so dominating this year, but I have hope, and “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” Wake Forest is the #2 in our bracket. It seems likely that we will make it to the Final four, if so then it will be against Illinois in the Semis. Beat them and I think you can give UW the national championships. Cross your fingers and pray hard. God likes it when we pray, especially about important things like NCAA basketball.

Friday brought me to see most of my living great Aunts and Uncles. Surprisingly, I have ten, five originals, five by marriage, still alive, all on my mom’s side and 80% of them are living in WI. Pictures will follow, in due course. Seeing them all again was wonderful. The last time was almost 20 years ago and I barely remember any of them. In fact, I didn’t remember any of them, but I know them now so they can expect me again when they see me.

I left WI Saturday morning and knocked out the longest leg of this journey. I pulled off exactly 1000 miles of driving in just over 16 hours. That was brutal. I do not recommend it to anyone and it, as with other things, made me realize that I am getting old and do want to settle down. I accomplished that feat because I wanted to get to PA and my Aunt and Uncle’s for church on Sunday. I made it, but not without much pain. (Please, cry for me.)

So here I sit. It is almost midnight now and I will sign off and pen more tomorrow before I hit the road again, this time for DC. I know this has been a long one, I apologize and will do my best the keep it from happening again.

Until then and tomorrow.

Jason