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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1688232" data-attributes="member: 2205">The Great Dyal Vacation of 2004 Trip Journal Entry #9: July 10thI woke up pretty tired today, not because we had been really active but because our hotel wasn't actually very conducive to a good night's sleep, as it turns out.  Julie seemed to be a little better; she always sleeps better than I do anyway, and something like a noisy environment leaking in through the door typically doesn't bother her.  So she drove first, and I reclined the chair (just about the only time I'd be able to, because otherwise Alexander would be right behind me) and slept for several hours as we took I-10 west.We continued on I-10 almost the entire day; we took it from the coast of Florida all the way to Houston, so we knew we'd see a fair chunk of it.  There's not a whole lot to report on that drive, frankly.  We saw two more accidents, although they didn't literally happen in view.  There was a semi on the side of the road in Mississippi (if I remember correctly) that looked blackened and burned out.  We saw another one crunched up against the side of a bridge; it looks like maybe two semis had crashed there.  It blocked up traffic a lot on the other side of the road, but didn't slow us down any.In Houston, we took the 610 loop around the northern edge of the city to US-290/Texas-6, and then at Hempstead we abandoned 290 and continued on 6.  By this time it was early evening, although not yet dark.  Something rather odd began to happen to me shortly after Hempstead that became quite acute as we passed Navasota and went in for the last twenty minutes or so of the drive before arriving in College Station.  I've never considered myself to be a very sentimental person.  I gladly picked up from the town I grew up in and moved to Michigan without a second thought because a good job was waiting for me there.However, as we started pulling into College Station, I started to have a very odd feeling.  College Station, or more properly Bryan, actually, the town that's literally stuck to the northwest border of College Station, is the town I grew up in.  I literally don't have any memories of a time before living there.  I'm entirely a product of the local education establishment; Bryan Independent School District and Texas A&M University (two degrees, even.)  Except for a two-year stint in Argentina, there was never a time I can remember that I didn't live in either Bryan or College Station until I moved up to Detroit.And I found that coming back, after only one brief trip in the last four years, that I felt a strange sense of connection to the place.  I felt like I was home, in a way that I never really felt in Detroit, despite having lived in the same community the entire time I've been there, despite a house and friends that I really enjoy.  Don't get me wrong; I have enjoyed living in Detroit, but there's something about going back home that was a powerful thing.In fact, the rest of the trip in general made me doubt my conviction to Detroit; we spent several days in Texas, even including parts that I was not really familiar with, such as Lubbock (where my parents relocated after I moved to Detroit) and all of Texas feels more like home to me than Michigan.  Luckily, I just rotated jobs here at work into one that I'm actually quite enjoying (and as my post count goes up, one where I obviously have more free time than my last one) so I'm not desperate to get out like I was starting to feel a few months ago, but once again I'm questioning if this is really where I want to end up or not, especially when this rotation's starting to wind down and I have to think about going somewhere else.</blockquote>

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