Change of travel plans = 12 hour drive

But I'm already home!

Today was a LONG day and full of the unexpected. To start, Chloe and I slept through 3 alarms and finally woke up at 11:00am -- checkout was at noon. I frantically showered and got dressed and started to pack up the room and in the midst of putting on my makeup spilled it all over my black shirt. So I re-dressed and tried again. We got out of the motel fairly smoothly after that, and stopped for coffee and gas before getting on the road. Shortly afterwards I nearly missed our exit and had to cut across two lanes at the last second. Thankfully there was no one very close behind me (and in Quebec they apparently expect you to pull moves like that).

A couple hours after leaving Brossard I was passing through Lévis and started mulling over the whole motel mess. I had initially booked my motel stays for this trip a month ago, back when I was still convinced there would be some way for me to haul all my stuff in a trailer behind me. I would normally make this drive in 2 days with an overnight stop in Lévis, but decided to extend it to 3 to give myself extra allowance for any trouble (or just slowness) the trailer might cause. After I realized the trailer wasn't going to work and hired a moving company I tried to cancel both my motel reservations so I could go back to my 2-day travel plan. I successfully cancelled the 2nd night (in Fredericton, NB) before realizing that my reservation in Brossard couldn't be changed. So last week I re-booked my reservation in Fredericton -- or so I thought.

After an 8 hour drive (and pretty much nothing to eat) we pulled into the Comfort Inn in Fredericton and I went inside to check in. They couldn't find my reservation in their computer but apparently had one for last weekend that had been a no-show. I went to the car to grab my printed e-mail confirmation and sure enough -- the reservation I made was for last week and I neither cancelled it nor showed up. I know exactly what happened, too. On their website, if you search the availability for a date and then choose a "bargain" price it resets the date on the next page. I know this because I've done it many many times. But this time I seem to have forgotten to re-change the date. I confirmed it, they sent me an e-mail, I printed it, and I even looked at the reservation receipt this afternoon before arriving and I just NEVER caught it.

(The most frustrating part is that I had a similar bout of idiocy back in April on my way to Maine. I thought I'd made a reservation for my stop in Brossard but the day before I went to print the confirmation and realized I'd never received it. And then I realized I'd never actually booked it. I'd followed the booking process through to the confirmation page on the website but never actually clicked "Confirm.")

In any case, once we got there the motel was completely booked and from the looks of it so was the other pet-friendly motel down the street. So after a quick phone call to my mother we decided that since I was only about 4 hours away I should just keep driving, making my arrival time in PEI between 1-1:30am. I got home a little before 1 (because I was the only car on the road in the middle of the night) and within an hour had broken 2 things and been offered another gig.

So now we're here. We're home. And everything was pitch black when we got here, so I didn't get the usually spectacular first view of the Island while crossing the bridge. But I did get to see stars -- lots of them. And a fox ran out in front of my car and startled me (and more so probably himself)! But I saw him and stopped in time. And if I didn't know so well where my driveway was I could totally have missed it in the dark. But we made it. And tomorrow we'll wake up in our blue house, surrounded by green land and red dirt and the ocean and an overwhelmingly vast sky.