The Last Leg Home

As if the three days on the train to Toronto were not enough, we had one more whole day of traveling to deal with to get home from Buffalo. We were up early enough the next morning, but took a little while to get going.  A quick stop for breakfast at a Starbucks, and we were on our way.  We could not take too much time getting home because we had time constraints at the end of our ride.  We wanted to avoid paying for an extra hour on the car rental (at $100 per hour) and Tom needed to make his flight home.

Having visited the northwestern corner of New York State many times in the past, I thought I would be familiar with the route to take from Buffalo to get back home.  I was mistaken.   Instead of a highway, we took a local road heading down south through the countryside.  It was a beautiful ride, especially at this time in the morning.  It occurred to me that this was quite a different kind of beauty from what I had experienced  in Canada.

We only made a couple of stops along the way, one for gas, at Lewis Run, PA,and the other for lunch at a place called Family Chill and Grill near Bald Eagle, PA.We got on to Interstate 99 after lunch, and I was feeling good enough to give a lecture about how the numbering of this highway violated the numbering convention as far as interstates were concerned.  (It took a politician and political action to make that happen.) I was also reminded that Altoona, a place along this highway, was a railfan destination.  Soon we were in Breezewood, PA, and on a familiar interstate highway, on our way home.

We were slowed down closer to home due to heavy traffic and barely made it back in time.  I retrieved the key to the house from a neighbor as soon as we got home.  (Fortunately they were around!)  Jesse and Christina immediately departed to BWI airport to return the rental car. They were a little late in returning the car, but the agent was nice enough to waive the extra charge.  Tom immediately called a Uber to take him to DCA airport.  He was able to get on his flight.  Jesse caught a flight to California early next morning.  And Christina stayed home for a few more days to take care of me.

It has now been a few weeks since I got back from the trip to Canada, a trip during which my return home was delayed by a week. Life is returning to a different kind of routine these days.  The day after we got back I was able to see the doctors here in Gaithersburg about my injuries.  I had a hard splint put on my left hand for the fracture of the metacarpal bone, a splint that  stayed on for three weeks, and which made it more difficult for me to do things, but which did nothing in the end to reset the broken bone.  The doctor now thinks it best to leave things the way they are if I do not have any pain and if I have no loss of functionality.  We’ll have to wait and see.  But now that the splint is off, I can at least do things around the house.  The road rash on my left side has healed for the most part.  Even the shoulder injuries look good these days.  It will be a while before the broken ribs are back to normal, and that is when and I can try to do much more with my left hand.  A new complication was the discovery of an AC separation of the left shoulder, a condition whose discovery seems to have eluded all the doctors along the way, until I diagnosed the situation myself at home and confirmed it with the doctor last week.  This might need some additional attention going forward. Hopefully there is nothing else latent lurking in the system waiting to raise its ugly head.  Que sera sera.

Well, this will probably be the end of this particular thread of blogs.  A final thanks to all of you helped me along the way both physically and mentally, and an apology to those whose lives and mental well-being I disrupted in any way along the way.  I owe all of you.

And now back to our regular programming!