A Moment Of Panic

One week from right now, assuming everything goes as planned, I will be in Washington DC. I will have been to and left the Michigan Delegation Pre-Inaugural reception, spoken to the governor and the lieutenant governor, and probably Bart Stupak and Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow as well, all people who got re-elected in part because of me. I will probably have my Inauguration ticket in hand, too. I'll be feeling pretty good. That's IF everything goes as planned.

I've been on many trips in my time that didn't work out. All of them involved my parents, of course, who were not big on planning ahead. There was the trip to Milwaukee, where we ended up broke because we left too late to go to the bank and we only had one check with us and ATMs had not yet been invented, and we merely drove around Milwaukee and Chicago for a while and then used the last of our money to go to the Milwaukee Zoo using my aunt's discount card and stay in a rent-by-the-hour kind of hotel, then coasted up to my grandparents' house on fumes hoping to borrow some money for gas to get the rest of the way home. There was the trip to Munising, an hour away, to see the fall colors, where we ended up in Duluth, 8 hours away, just because, and had to drive halfway back home before we could find a sleazy hotel room to stay in because all the good rooms were already taken by color-touring rich people who had planned ahead. There was the trip to a pow wow in the Sault where we drove through the woods intending to camp somewhere along the way and never did because the flies were too thick and ended up bathing after 3 days in the St. Mary's River, which felt like it had turned from iceberg to river only moments before we slipped into it. There were a million more trips just like those.

So the trips that are my own, I plan every second of. I think of every possibility ahead of time and try to plan for them all. For this Washington trip, I took over the planning, partly because we are traveling on my money and partly because I am afraid to let anyone else do it. I found out we needed train tickets ahead of time for Inauguration Day, and I bought them. I bought extra tickets for the other days we will be there, too, just in case it is crowded and hard to get tickets, or just in case we are running late and have to dash right onto the train. I have those in my possession now. I booked our hotel, and another for the trip home so we have a place to sleep, since we will, no doubt, be tired by then. I got addresses for every single place we may want to go so that I can plug them into my GPS and find my way. I have a list of things to pack a mile long, and a separate list of what I need to buy. I have my wardrobe planned for the entire trip. I look at the Weather Channel website daily.

And then today, I went to the transit system website to be sure my tickets will work at the station I intend to use them from. It took me an hour to find out that they will, because the tickets I bought are being discontinued and so the information on them is not easily accessible anymore. Thank god they are still being honored! That was what kicked off my moment of panic. Once I had discovered that the tickets were good, then I tried to find the train schedule, to be sure we can be in Washington when we need to. I found the schedule, reassured myself, and then scrolled to the bottom of the schedule just to read the extra information. And then I saw it.

MARC trains do not run on the following holidays: Martin Luther King Jr. Day...

It went on from there, of course, but that was when I completely panicked. Because I already had the train tickets, and because we needed to get into Washington on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and because I thought everything was going to work out and then my world fell in on me.

45 minutes of panic-stricken typing and clicking ensued, as I frantically tried to forget about the money I had wasted and find some other way to get from Baltimore to DC on Monday.

And then, finally, I found a section of news releases and read them all in pure desperation. And one of them announced the MARC's Martin Luther King Jr Day schedule. Which meant they at least HAD a schedule. And the station we intended to use is open for normal runs, all day long, because of the fact that it is an Inauguration year.

And life is good again.