The week from hell that allowed me to say goodbye... (part 1)

In preparation for my grandmother's memorial, which required travel, I worked hellishly long hours at work, and then at home for school, with the hopes of getting ahead on my school work... No such luck...

Between work and school commitments, I didn't start packing until the morning we were supposed to leave for Colorado... The plus side is that due to a mechanical at work, Aaron was able to come home that day rather than have to take the red-eye to Seattle, with the hopes that we would meet there...

So, Aaron and I headed to the airport, with all our stuff needed for Colorado (including ALL of my school work)... By the grace of God, we both made it out on the same flight (although, he ALMOST got bumped in Ketchikan - thanks to the other 2 non-rev's that didn't want to travel seperately!). After running to catch our next flight, the day turned into a "hurry-up-and-wait" kind of day. Neither of us had slept more than a couple of hours the night before, so we were both wrecked on the flight.

I knew when I made the car rental reservation that the car counter was not in the terminal and we had to ride a bus to go get it, but I didn't realize it was SO FAR from the terminal... Holy cow, that was a long bus ride...

We were debating on staying the night in Denver and heading to see my family 3 hours away the next day... I got a bug up my butt and decided that we HAD to get there that night... On the plus side, we had really AWESOME customer service at Enterprise and got an amazing upgrade on our (economy) vehicle to a Luxury SUV for less that the additional rental for a GPS unit... The Luxury SUV had the GPS built in... Let me just say, that if I had $50K to spend on a car, I would so get that one! Maybe some day. I loved driving it. Other than the amount of time we spent in Denver traffic (poor planning had us arriving in Denver during rush-hour), I wasn't fatigued at all once we reached Walsenburg. Ok, well, that may be a lie - I was wrecked... But I wasn't as fatigued as I would have been if I had driven the economy car for an additional 3.5 hours...