Thinking Travel

These past few weeks it’s been hot. Sticky. Steamy. Oppressive.

Sweating-in-places-you-didn’t-know-could-sweat-hot.

Summers in North Carolina are just fine if you spend your time moving from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned car to you air-conditioned workplace to an air-conditioned restaurant.

By this time of year I’m usually tired of a/c air and I drive with the windows down rather than turn on the a/c. But we’ve been without a/c at home for the past few weeks and it’s been downright miserable the past few days. Our thermostat has registered a consistent 91.5 degrees.

It’s been so hot that blinking makes me sweat.

Anyway, the good news is that it cooled a bit last night and we’ll hopefully have someone look at and maybe even fix our heat pump next week.

The bad news…the a/c in our car just went out.

Other blog-title-related news:

Aaron and I are going to the Cure concert in Charlotte in September!

I’ll spare you the ticket ordeal with the stupid pre-sale and getting locked out of ticketmonster’s website and their phone system not working…What counts is that we have two tickets that are next to each other. So right now we’re pretty darn happy, even though we didn’t score front row (or even close-enough-to-see-the-stage) seats.

The last Cure concert I went to was in ’92. Not only was it the best concert I’ve ever experienced, it included a pretty fun road trip. Here’s the trip in a bulleted nutshell:

• Five of us got tickets for the Seattle concert, a five-hour drive from Eugene
• My boyfriend-at-the-time (BATT), his friend and I decided to roadtrip together
• Problem #1: My BATT rode his bike everywhere and didn’t drive.
• Problem #2: My BATT’s friend had a license but didn’t have a car.
• Problem #3: I could drive and I had a car and it was big enough for the three of us and all of our stuff but it was an elderly car that I didn’t dare take past the city limits.
• So we decided to rent a car.
• Problem # 1: I was under 21 and couldn’t rent the car.
• Problem # 2: My BATT was over 21 but didn’t have a license, so he couldn’t rent the car.
• Problem # 3: My BATT’s friend was over 21, had a license, but didn’t have the credit card that was needed to the rent the car. And he lived in Seaside — 3 1/2 hours away on the other side of a mountain range.
• So we used my credit card and my BATT’s friend’s driver’s license to rent the car.
• Then my BATT’s friend took the Greyhound to Eugene to sign the rental car paperwork because the rental company that offered us the best price didn’t rent from Seaside.
• The three of us then drove 3 1/2 hours back to Seaside (can’t remember why we had to do this but I remember that we had to do this). Seaside isn’t exactly on the way to Seattle.
• After spending the night in Seaside we drove to Seattle for the BEST. CONCERT. EVER.
• Then we stayed at the SCARIEST. MOTEL. EVER.
• Wearing our over-priced and over-sized Cure concert t-shirts (remember, it was 1992) we drove the rental car back to Eugene via Seaside, all the while basking in the glow that comes from seeing the band you’re completely in love with while in the company of friends.

This time things will be a little different, and by different I mean easier. We’ll hop in the CRV, drive two hours to Charlotte, sleep in a nice hotel, and eat at whichever restaurant we want. I’ll buy a Cure concert t-shirt (we’ll see if they’re still over-sized) and won’t fret about forking over a day’s pay for it.

But there is one question that’s keeping us up at night…

What do we wear to a Cure concert in 2007??!!