2023 Bear Hunt Day -0.5 - On the Road

I like summer.  There is always too much to do.  Summer means bicycle rides and cicadas and crickets and shorts and humidity and motorcycles and Queen Anne's lace.

I also hate summer.  The doldrums of work-eat-sleep-repeat.  There is always too much to do.  It doesn't get dark until long after I want to be asleep.  The heat and humidity.

David Foster Wallace may have said it best, "There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about..."  Or maybe it was Hunter Thompson, "That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without selling himself out as a Judas goat."

We're starting to turn; hints of those first oddly cool mornings that remind us the northern half of the earth is starting to tilt into its own shadow.  Sunset has pulled back to a more reasonable hour.  Sunrise waits to give me a few more minutes of blessed quiet on weekend mornings.  The time between the Perseids and Orinids is unquestionably magical.  That is ... until this past week which ended up being the hottest week of the year.  Possibly the hottest week of several years if the local news is to be believed.  This makes thinking about things like bear hunting and deer hunting (not that far away) much harder to think about.

But a vacation day allowed the lawn to be mowed - hoping that a wallop of rain on Thursday doesn't make it grow too too much.

And Friday finally came.  It was a blessedly slow day.  I'm not sure where my boss was most of the day but I finally ran into him about 20 minutes before I wanted to leave.  "I'll catch up with you later," he says.

"There is no later, I'm out of here by 1:00."

We caught up for a few minutes and after organizing things in the trucklette I was on the road.

I headed out and got around Indianapolis before rush hour.  That city is perpetually under massive construction.  I'm convinced it will never end.  Traffic thinned considerably as I motored along listening to podcasts.  Has RadioLab gone downhill?

There was one moderate construction slowdown around Bloomington and I was in Mendota - probably at the same hotel I stayed at in 2019.  It was still brutally hot, making unpacking a bit painful.  Temperatures were forecast to come down.  The Maverick was (hopefully) safely parked next to its big cousin.  

The day ended with a noodle bowl, Oreos The Most Stuf and gratitude that I can do this yet again.