It's fitting that the Villa air conditioning should go out just in time to ensure that the entire packing and loading process is conducted in 90-degree-plus temperatures. The side of my 15' Budget truck is emblazoned with Moving Tip #12: Wear plenty of deodorant on day of move. I'm expecting tropical weather in, say, Chang Mai, but I'd really like to avoid character-building levels of humidity while still in the first world. Speaking of the horrors of the States, Maria and I swung by Wal-Mart and picked up the final ingredients for our drive across the country. Mainly Pringles and some ratchet tie-downs for the motorcycle. We're shipping out in the morning. Thanks to the glory that is legislative terrorism paranoia, we'll be stopping at the 20-or-so weigh stations between here and Portland. Boo-ya. My one planned stop is a random monument off the side of the freeway somewhere in Wyoming. Maria's only planned stops are at every single gas station we pass to recaffeinate. I guess that's one side effect of working at a coffee bistro for several months.


If the continental divide doesn't eat us, we'll be in Oregon on Sunday. Maria heads to her final destination of Berkeley, California exactly X days later. Goodbye Nashville. Y'all be good now, y'hear?

I'm burying my cold weather clothes in the deepest, darkest, least accessible storage container I can find. Why? Because my seasons are proceeding in this sequence: spring, summer, spring, summer, spring, summer, fall, winter. Pbbbbbt.

Kyle and Maria each wrapped up their tenure at the Marriott last night as well. The downside is that the management will have to find other "adept Vandy grads [to] provide smart service." Kyle garnered that review for the second floor restaurant, but my ground-level bar and I somehow found our way into the picture, so I'll take half the credit. An upside to leaving is that I won't have to shave on consecutive days anymore.

Tonight was the last evening at the lobby bar. The Zebra Lounge. Longitude. Whatever management decides to call it. Walking up the steps to Villa, I realized that I wanted to go back and clock in tomorrow. This is my first job that has passed the morning litmus test. If I wake up in the morning and don't immediately mind that I have to go to work, it's a good vocation. Admittedly, a bartending commute uses a liberal definition of 'morning', but still. On the ride there, it's always felt more like running an errand than going to work. I'm never especially eager to get there, but there was never dread. I'd been used to that. I cannot and will not be an engineer, because I felt that dread when I've woken up for those jobs. I was good at this. I was not the fastest drink slinger, and I still have only a general idea of what's in a Mai Tai, but that's not what it's about. I rationally know that I can always go back to bartending (if ever there was a recession-proof job, this is it), but at least at this moment, I sincerely and mournfully miss the particular arrangement of granite, hardwood, staff and customers that made up my bar.

3,500 glasses of wine. 5,600 mixed drinks. And 8,300 beers. Using my fairly comprehensive records, that's the best estimate of the number of drinks I've tossed into glasses over the last fifteen months. I have two nights left as the main lounge bartender at the Vanderbilt Marriott. Casualties of the job include three wine tools, two church keys, countless fingertip epidermal layers, and what used to be a nice pair of Rockports. I've had the pleasure of chatting with everyone from Ben Stein to a former Secretary of State. I guess there were also some other folks who didn't have dry senses of humor, but they weren't nearly as fun. Optimists lie - not everyone has a good story to tell. A damn lot of you do, though. I've discussed the details of dry cleaning technology, television production, songwriting, and a state-o-the-art Canadian three-dimensional touchpad. Turns out my electrical engineering degree is functional - as a conversation starter.


The late night job hasn't been an impediment to the trip prep. It actually feeds me into prime box-scrounging temporal territory at grocery stores. For some reason, the late-night stockers are much more anxious to help me gather cardboard when Maria's lending a hand. Huh. Another forty-five minutes and a 24/7 Kinkos landed Kyle and I with stacks of photocopies of our passports and plane tickets. I thought I was done with 50% resizing / creative taping orientations in order to fit everything on two sides of an 8.5"x11" when I finished e-mag. Regardless, we can now stuff backups of our critical documents into all sorts of crannies. Speaking of which, it doesn't hurt my manliness to get a silk money belt, does it?

I'll miss Nashville. Mostly the barbeque, actually. I've finally found a replacement for the belated Fate's. Steve, Maria and I gave Jack's Broadway location a try last week. Touristy, as feared? Yes, but that didn't stop them from serving a $15.99 monster of a family pack that kept the three of us quiet for a solid twenty minutes. Stick with the Texas hot tomato-based sauce for the pork shoulder, but the Nashville-style vinegar-based sauce complemented the straightforward cornbread. Maria gave the thumbs-up to the St. Louis sweet-and-tangy, also found as the base for their baked beans. Of course, when Jake and I tried reprising the experience tonight, we fell victim to Nashville's patent-pending "close the only worthwhile places in town early and often" strategy, proudly exemplified by Samurai Sushi and Rotier's.


All in all, I feel that I've fully tapped the middle Tennessee locale. Jack Daniel's distillery tour? Check. Four-wheeling with J.R.? Check. Hayride disturbed only by a sublime smattering of fireflies? Check. Firing a smorgasbord of various caliber weaponry on a friend's otherwise pastoral farm? Check. I'll miss the marvelous folks I've gotten to know in the last six years, and I cherish my memories here, but it's time for me to head back to the Northwest. I want temperate weather and fewer skeeters. More recycling on the curb and less Old Testament in the legislation. It'll be hard to put the combination of the Natchez Trace and my Nighthawk behind me, though. Shiny side up, rubber side down.

I imagine that the least comfortable thing about travelling will not be hauling all my possessions about on my back. It won't be the tropical insects. The poisonous-is-par Australian fauna shouldn't be an issue. I'll be able to adjust to much lower hygiene standards. Hostel beds might not be the most comfortable, but my mattress here in Nashville is cheap too. No, the least comfortable thing about travelling will be typing in Qwerty.

This weblog business is a telling microcosm of my one-step-forward-three-steps-back efforts to move from Nashville and migrate across the Pacific thusfar. Having erased the reminder to Create blog from my ToDo.txt, it's now apparent that I need to add reminders to:

• Relearn HTML
  
• Personalize blog template
  
• Find ad-free webspace
  
• Upgrade to blogger pro (if needed)
  

The tickets showed up yesterday. Kyle and I are scheduled to meet at and fly out of Seattle together on August 27. Destination: Oahu and my aunt Bobbee's abode. We're flying to Thailand on September 7, and scurrying about mainland Southeast Asia until we puddle jump to Bali via Singapore. That'll probably happen on October 18. If SARS doesn't get us, the extremists will. Failing that, we'll be in Perth on October 29. Looks as though there's a train that'll get us to the east coast. We're leaving Brisbane for Wellington, New Zealand on November 26. Mr. Flubacker tramps on home to Chicago December 30. Our rough estimate as we went over the tickets last night was that his birthday will last 42 hours. I'm sticking around kiwi country until February 22, 2004. Oddly, I don't get back to Portland until March 1. I think Fiji might be to blame.