Tapetenwechsel: Aurora, CO

I learned this word a few years ago to mean "a change of scenery." I hope it's right, because it's a good sounding word, and I like having a singular word to describe things. (Probably my favorite thing about German, really. They have a single noun for everything. Even if it is 18 letters long.)

Needless to say, Tapetenwechsel is something I have needed desperately for a really long time now.

While technically, I got it back in May when my theatre troupe performed in Santa Barbara, we were only there for a few days and it was a school-related trip, so while I was in a new place, it felt less like a vacation and more like the same old same old. Santa Barbara was lovely though. 

It was during  a late-night chat with 63 that I decided I really wanted to go out to Nebraska to see some family that I haven't seen since my dad's funeral, almost three years ago. And some that I haven't seen since before that, even.

Originally,  the plan was to road trip it, with 63, but that plan fell through for a lot of reasons. Most of them to do with Bad Timing in every possible fucking direction, like accidentally making confessions that weren't ever supposed to be confessed... 

But I wanted to make the drive, to see road behind me, watch the odometer show me how many miles I'd gone, but Nano didn't want to do it that way, and I've been trying to extend olive branch after olive branch because I don't like that my sister and I can never get along for more than a few hours at a time, so I compromised, and we flew out. To make our schedules match, I ended up cutting my originally planned time frame nearly in half, so Nano's insistence that, in the middle of our trip, we drive to Colorado to see our cousin kind of irked me. Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to see this cousin and her family, because they are some of the family that I'm much closer to, but the point was to see people I don't get to see very often, and this group is one that flies out to West Virginia fairly regularly, so it's time that we could have spent with other people.

So yesterday we drove the 5ish hours from Lexington, Nebraska to Aurora, Colorado, and now I'm sitting on the floor of my cousin's living room waiting for my sister to be done with the bathroom so I can finally shower. 

On top of sister-struggles, this hasn't felt much like a vacation yet because until last night, I was finishing up some papers for a class I had this summer. I hope now that I've gotten the last of it turned in that I can relax a little bit. It's also been kind of rough on the Broken Brain front, what with randomly crying from time to time for no good reason. 

Here's to hoping the other half of the trip is better.