{"id":4650,"date":"2023-08-05T18:37:48","date_gmt":"2023-08-05T18:37:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=4650"},"modified":"2023-08-05T18:37:48","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T18:37:48","slug":"vacation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2023\/08\/vacation\/","title":{"rendered":"Vacation"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Picked up by a super fly 73 year old black woman driving like me that is, turning her neck to the right to check that blind spot.<\/li>\n<li>The closer I get to France, the more French it becomes. Check out is literally two minutes long. At the gates where America is already left behind after a long walk, French kids are running around and the hostesses are way too confused about the usual?<\/li>\n<li>I have a KN95 hugging my face. A child is coughing every 20 seconds not far from me. Turns out, she does that for 10 hours. A few folks started coughing when we landed. I feel OK.<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s raining and 15\u00b0\/59\u00b0 in Paris. Summer rain could have waited a day or two I think.<\/li>\n<li>Picked up by a not so super fly 70+ year old white man but he\u2019s my dad and pretty damn awesome.<\/li>\n<li>Summer road work ahead, it takes us one hour instead of 30mn to get back home.<\/li>\n<li>Sipping on coffee like a vampire on a cute neck.<\/li>\n<li>Quiet room plus insane amount of sleep missing: slept like a bear in winter.<\/li>\n<li>France and not being cold. I had completely forgotten about the feeling and it is <em>noice<\/em>. Oh, and it\u2019s so green.<\/li>\n<li>Morning in grandma\u2019s attic moving out 50 year old invoices, just a gazillion boxes of those. My nose is stuffy from the dust but a few gems were found, like a vintage <a href=\"https:\/\/www.radiomuseum.org\/r\/sony_tv_9_90_um_tv990u.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sony Transistor TV Receiver 9-90UM<\/a> in its leather case, yessir.<\/li>\n<li>I go back to my adolescence mall to swap a sim card for a nano sim card for my French phone. Not much has changed. Same Sephora, same place, different scents I guess.<\/li>\n<li>The density of construction and the number of buildings in the suburbs stay insane. You simply look at walls and windows <em>all the time<\/em>. There\u2019s no void, no breathing. It\u2019s insane.<\/li>\n<li>Hitting the road to go to my uncle\u2019s birthday party. It\u2019s raining, duh.<\/li>\n<li>Four straight days with mom and pop. They can\u2019t stop talking. I\u2019m in the back of the car and put music in my ears.<\/li>\n<li>Four hours in I take over driving. I have 3 GPS: the car, pop with his memory and mom with an old paper map. It\u2019s a mess and we keep getting on the wrong path yet in the right direction.<\/li>\n<li>Running out of gas right before hitting the city we\u2019re supposed to hit. We barely make it to the gas station.<\/li>\n<li>But we\u2019re there! We finally recognize our landmarks and proceed through winding roads up and down the beautiful French countryside. It is warm and humid. I haven\u2019t been here in almost twenty years.<\/li>\n<li>I finally see my cousin Anne who jumps on me and we hug for long minutes. It is so good to see everyone. I missed all the funerals in the past ten years.<\/li>\n<li>Catching up with all the kids and kids\u2019 kids. We\u2019re about to be 50 at the table.<\/li>\n<li>My uncle is overwhelmed and can\u2019t finish his speech. He finds a way to give me a special shoutout for answering emails rapidly. We all laugh and take pictures, grabbing shoulders and touching backs.<\/li>\n<li>Our airBnB is super dope. Walls are 48\u201d thick. Quiet and sleep are supreme here. I feel refreshed even though I didn\u2019t sleep much, had too much food and too many drinks.<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s time to leave. A few tears and long hugs (which are rare in France).<\/li>\n<li>Time to go see my foster mom. I\u2019ve never done the trip from one family to the other in a single day. Emotionally super wild.<\/li>\n<li>She\u2019s 86 and she is chilling in front of the TV when I arrive. She can barely walk now and this is concerning. Her kids and grandkids around are tired of her being so goddamn stubborn, not listening to nothing.<\/li>\n<li>Anyway, I take her and her daughter and half sister for me, to the restaurant in Sancerre. I want to order everything on the menu.<\/li>\n<li>We make her walk a bit to the car and she is going way too fast with her cane, like she\u2019s a Formula 1 at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Circuit_de_Nevers_Magny-Cours\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magny-Cours<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I leave the next day after lunch at 11:30am. We take a couple nice pictures together.<\/li>\n<li>Back on the road, direction Touraine. It\u2019s grey and it rains, and it\u2019s windy as hell.<\/li>\n<li>I take a freeway, which doesn\u2019t have any gas station on it. The light comes on as I pull over in a gas station, on the next freeway. Not stressful at all.<\/li>\n<li>In front of me a couple from the Netherlands tries to make sense of where to select diesel on the touchscreen. They can\u2019t and I cannot either. It feels good to speak English with them.<\/li>\n<li>I finally arrive at the New Passivehaus Crib. Under construction. I visit and explore with my sister. It\u2019s going to be great!<\/li>\n<li>Emotionally exhausted, I sleep through the wind blowing like crazy outside.<\/li>\n<li>We leave the next day. Three hours later we are back in Paris suburbs. More invoices to get rid of, I mown the lawn.<\/li>\n<li>I go out to go see an ex. Stuck in traffic, taking 45mn instead of 20. I\u2019m a little sick of driving those tiny streets at this point.<\/li>\n<li>We\u2019re at a brasserie and it is dope. Catching up and smiling.<\/li>\n<li>One last day doing nothing besides going through the blues. Starting to pack, etc. It\u2019s pouring regularly outside and I\u2019m giving up on seeing another friend. Family time.<\/li>\n<li>Mom is not great at goodbyes. She immediately looks away after I give her a hug. I understand.<\/li>\n<li>Dad drives me to the airport an drops me off. He is sad and I am too, but we hug, smile, and say nice words. It\u2019s hard to travel alone in those moments. I observe him driving away, until I see the back of his Toyota.<\/li>\n<li>CDG. Here we go \u2018gain. Security is a whole mess, the plane takes off one hour late, which makes me miss my shuttle at LAX. I have a bunch of drunk French mfs who never did this trip next to me and it is tedious.<\/li>\n<li>LAX\u2019 smell when you get out. Yikes. But on a parking lot 5mn away, the breeze is good, the sun is good and now I feel like I\u2019m on vacation. Except that I\u2019m not anymore.<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019m on the phone with Supershuttle and Supershuttle orders a Lyft for me.<\/li>\n<li>Fly ass ageless black woman shows up. Yes, she drives like me too. Friend texts me to ask if I\u2019m back. I am. I take the wind, the sun, my beautiful hills with SUVs and trap music all in. 16 hours of travel, I\u2019m home.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And now everything feels like a giant dream I had recently. A trip, indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Picked up by a super fly 73 year old black woman driving like me that is, turning her neck to the right to check that blind spot. The closer I get to France, the more French it becomes. Check out is literally two minutes long. At the gates where America is already left behind after [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4650"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4651,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4650\/revisions\/4651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}