Honeymoon Itinerary
I review everything with the house-sitter. Make sure to give the cat her medication. The front door doesn’t latch so lock it every time you leave or come in. Please don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink. Feel free to eat anything in the fridge, even though you’ll probably only eat the frozen stuff. The house-sitter is my brother.
We have three vodka sodas at the airport bar. It’s a shitty airport, so it only has the one shitty bar that’s actually more of a barbecue restaurant. The waiter informs us that we can take our vodka sodas into the terminal in to-go cups. Maybe this isn’t such a shitty airport after all.
The flight is boring, like all flights. The flight attendant chastises me for getting up while the seat belt sign is on, but I really, really have to go to the bathroom. We play spades and I actually manage to win a few hands. That rarely happens. I revel in the small victory.
We pick up the rental. It’s our honeymoon, so when the guy working the Avis desk asks if we want to upgrade to the cherry red Mustang GT, we say, “Fuck it.” It’s a cool car. I never really cared about cars, but maybe I just needed to be in the right car with the right person.
Seattle makes me feel small. I feel that way almost every time I travel. There’s huge, industrial machinery everywhere that looks somehow ancient, like they’ve been stalwart sentinels since the city was first settled.
We go to brunch at The Wandering Goose. I read that they have homemade southern biscuits and I’ve been fantasizing about them for days. The biscuits are fucking fantastic, and that’s enough to make up for the fact that they don’t have Bloody Mary’s. We manage to find a table outside even though it’s really packed, and I tell you, not for the first time, that like all things with you and me, it was meant to be.
The drive to Mt. Rainier is both beautiful and infuriating. We’re stuck in traffic and the SUV in front of us won’t move forward unless there’s a spot in the shade. We make up a drinking game. Guess the color of the next car in oncoming traffic. This game only works when you’re stuck in slow traffic on a two-lane highway. We toss a few names back and forth.
“Color Wheel,” I say. “Get it? Because it’s the color wheel, but also cars have wheels?” Hahaha.
“I get it,” you say. You sound a little annoyed, but you’re smiling.
The park is busy. Throngs of people group together, and they all seem to keep forgetting that it’s rude to take up the entire walkway. It’s pissing me off, but I don’t say anything. It’s pissing you off, and you say something loud enough for people to hear you and refused to move out of their way. We’re both abrasive in complementary ways, I think to myself. You don’t let people hog the sidewalk and I convince you to jump over a guide rail so we can get a good view of Myrtle Falls. It’s beautiful and no one’s standing in the way because we’re not even supposed to be here.
A guy at the bar last night recommended that we visit Pike’s Place Market. We search for parking for about 30 minutes and discover that we don’t really want to go to Pike’s Place after all.
We buy tickets to the Space Needle and, to pass the time until the next 40-floor elevator ride up to the top, go to Chihuly Garden and Glass. The gardens are filled with strange glass chandeliers that look like Medusa’s snakes. “These remind me of Annihilation,” I tell you. We watched that recently — the Natalie Portman movie with the strange genetic aberrations.
“They remind me of Metroid,” you say.
Neither of us is a very astute art critic.
I’ve been loudly declaring that I want ice cream all day. I finally get it when we stop at a shop that says “BOOZY OR NOT BOOZY MILKSHAKES.” We order a key lime pie milkshake — boozy, of course — and put two straws in it, like we’re two kids at the counter of an old-timey diner.
It’s your birthday and we hike to Multnomah Falls. On the way, we split an ice cream cone. Later, we a split a vodka cranberry and study the shuffleboard at our Airbnb. Neither of us knows how to play, so we make up our own rules, just like with everything else.
There’s a lot of driving between Portland and San Francisco. There are endless small towns with names like Newport, Orrin, Caspar, and Fort Bragg. We make a game of speculating what the people that live in these towns do. We decide that the main industries in the rural northwest must be woodcarving and glass blowing. The one thing that every town seems to have is an espresso stand and an Ace Hardware. You comment on this endlessly, delightedly. “Oh, look,” you say. “They have ESPRESSO. And here I was getting worried they’d only have black coffee.” I laugh every single time.
We go to Glass Beach in Mendocino. There’s not much glass, but there are a lot of ravens perched near the trails. They’re big, frightening birds that I find myself strangely enchanted with. I point them out and you say, “I think those are just crows,” but as we walk back to the car we pass a placard that says, “Animals of the Northern California Coast.” Common raven is listed at the top, and I dutifully point that out to you.
The coast is beautiful, but it terrifies me. Some of the highways twist and turn like angry sea serpents. Some of them don’t have guardrails. One brief moment of inattention and we’d hurtle down, down, down to the jagged rocks and cold water below. I imagine, in those brief, final seconds, clinging to your hand and telling you that I love you, one last time. This does not come to pass. You’re a good driver, and I have a penchant for melodrama.
I feed you while you’re driving. I make sure your pretzels have the perfect amount of hummus and I eat all the weirdly shaped almonds so you can have the normal ones with the most Thai Chili salt on them. I don’t know if you notice these things, but I’m not doing it because I want you to notice. I’m doing it because I love you.
“Are you ready to go home?” You ask me on our last night.
“Yes,” I say. “I miss our bed.” But what I mean is that I never left home, because that’s wherever you are.
