Road trip

I  am back down at my dad and Marty's place in greater Palm Springs, about a month-and-a-half ahead of schedule. I drove down beginning midday Monday, taking about 30 hours to make the trip including various stops along the way. I only stopped for rest and food, but even though I was kind of hurrying down, I did opt for the more appealing route. I-5 after you pass the mountains around Weed is just boring as hell, so I cut east around Eugene through the mountains and a few small towns over to a road that takes you down to Klamath Falls and eventually to US 395.

It's an interesting way to go, a route I've done more than once in each direction before, and if I were being leisurely and willing to spend extra time and money I'd avail myself of the many recreation areas and little towns and other points of interest. Lake Topaz is interesting and pretty. Plenty of nice mountain camping areas. And for historical import there's Manzanar and Tulelake, but I've stopped at those before.

It's also more hazardous in some places. I nearly hit a deer in the middle of the night south of Tulelake, for instance. That was a nice test of my brakes (successful!) and made the point that the big cooler on my passenger seat might be better off being seat-belted into place.

All in all, though, it was a rather uneventful drive and, thanks to my Prius getting better than 2½ times the mileage of my old Subaru, I only had to fill up the tank three times, the last when I was nearly at the end of the trip. (Had I started out with a full tank, I'd have only needed to fill up twice. Gas for coming here and going back combined is going to end up costing less than half of what a plane ticket would have.) The lengthy drive did reveal some new annoyances regarding my sprained wrist; you wouldn't think there'd be much wrist action with driving, but there is, especially on stretches of windy road. My wrist brace was helpful, and it's now a week since the injury so range of motion is almost normal, but I'm hoping it'll be less/not at all painful on the return trip.

Rushing down did result in my being pretty wiped out when I got here, though, and I ended up sleeping much of today; not what I had in mind for this visit, but now that I've gotten caught up I should be able to right that ship somewhat. Because there's simultaneously a lot and not much for me to do here.

My dad isn't doing well, he's 83 and has Alzheimer's (definitively diagnosed just recently), which hasn't been a huge deal yet, but as mentioned before, a recent general anesthesia surgery has exacerbated things. Marty is understandably overwhelmed, and  after just 24 hours or so here I have a better understanding of why. Sometimes our discussion is normalish, other times he's really confused. Sometimes he's convinced he's staying in some sort of hospital-provided facility on a campus somewhere and not at home. He referred to my sister by my mom's name a couple of times. But I've yet to see how he does early in the day, I imagine things are better then. I did meet his in-home nurse today, someone who's here once a week for a while, at least, and she seems on the ball and helpful. Physically, Dad appears to be a little better than the last time I was here in the fall, though he sure sounds more feeble when he talks.

I don't know, it's all fairly sobering and yet somehow ... not? My vocabulary fails me at this. Dad's deterioration has seemed very fast to me, but that's likely because I only see him in person once or twice a year; on the other hand, he's not really taken care of himself for many years, he's never been one to engage his mind in the sort of exercise one needs to do as they age—unlike my grandfather (on my mom's side), who lived into his 90s and was sharp the whole way through even as his body failed him; Grandpa read a lot of fiction, loved crosswords, followed baseball, kept a social circle of sorts even as it kept diminishing as he outlived his peers. Dad's never done those things and has no local social circle to speak of outside of Marty. So from an objective point of view this isn't a surprise at all, yet, you know, it's my dad, so even when it's predictable it still lands differently.

I'm getting accustomed to the feeling that I'll be an orphan soon. And I'm getting equally accustomed to the idea that that will be OK. It's a very strange state of mind to experience.

Later tonight there's a new episode of Strange New Worlds. I'm looking forward to that as a mental palate cleanser. (Even though I'm expecting it not to be very good.)