My biggest takeaway from the last five days is the shocking damage a three hour time change can do to my sleep schedule. I went to work this morning on four and a half hours of sleep, and that is nobody’s fault but my own (for foolishly not buying more melatonin before going away).
Sleep deprivation was absolutely worth it, though, to have a few days with my family. I didn’t even yell at anyone, other than the one time I did yell at everyone for reasons I can no longer remember. But that’s better than my usual family vacation behavior, so I can live with it.
After arriving in Seattle late on Wednesday night, I spent Thursday morning walking around Pike’s Place with my parents before we met Ben for lunch at our first dim sum stop of the day. My parents were each convinced they knew of a better dim sum restaurant in town, and the only way to know who was right was to go to both. My mom won (as per usual), and my dad actually brought us back to the place we tried the last time we visited Seattle, six years ago.
Forgot to get to the point at the beginning, but we went to Seattle because Ben has an internship at Zillow there (I’m really sorry to everyone who watches my Snap stories, I know I overdid the Zillow thing, but bragging about Ben makes me feel cool by association).
My parents spent a few days beforehand traveling around Oregon with my dad’s high school friends, and during that time, my mom fell in love with a beach house in [town name redacted], that she is fully convinced she’s buying for the sake of her grandchildren. Ben and I, unfortunately, had to break it to her that there won’t be any grandchildren anytime soon. I can’t tell you what city the house is in because she’s worried one of you will get the house before her. Obviously, most of my college friends who read this blog are in the market for a vacation home.
Anyway. We spent most of Friday on a boat in Lake Washington without Ben, which was amazing (the boat part, not the without Ben part). As much as I love living in a big city, I really miss going to the lake at home. Not that Big Sandy even compares to where we were, but it’s something. Can’t WAIT until Debbie buys her Oregon beach house so I can fly 13 hours round trip every single weekend to go boating.
After a refreshing day of swimming and drinking and reading, without getting sunburnt (!!!), I was two full hours late to meet my Chi O friend Haley for drinks, which is a new low for me. That, of course, resulted in me being almost half an hour late to family dinner afterward. I swear I’m not usually like that. But it was still worth it to catch up with someone who gets the whole living-in-Nebraska-your-whole-life-then-suddenly-moving-halfway-across-the-country thing. We both love it, it’s just a big change, ya know?
On Saturday morning, I put on my jeans and cute sneakers to “””drive around””” San Juan Island for the day. Emphasis on my expectation that we would just be “DRIVING AROUND.” We did technically spend a lot of time driving, but we also spent a lot of time on rocks I was not appropriately dressed to climb. I tore my favorite jeans open. It was still worth it. But I am disappointed.
I finished out the weekend yelling at someone at our hotel about my mom’s rings she left in the room, only to find out she actually wore the rings back to Nebraska, then forgot she had taken them off in her room. Neat. This did, however, save me an hour of sitting around at the airport, and I instead rolled up to the gate right as my group was boarding.
The weirdest part of this trip was saying “see you… I don’t know when” to Ben as he dropped me off for my flight. He still has two years of school left, but it seems like he’ll just keep going back to the west coast while I stay in New York. Going from adjoining bedrooms to living on opposite sides of the country was a pretty big jump, and I’m still not entirely adjusted. On the bright side, that’s just another excuse for me to take more vacations.