There's No Place Like Home...

It's been exactly two weeks since we got here and Florida is finally starting to rub-off on me.

The months leading up to the move out here from New Mexico were filled with many emotions - excitement being one. I envisioned the moment we crossed the state line; I was convinced I'd fall in love with everything related to Florida, the heavens would open up and shine a light upon our little Dodge Neon as we drove closer to our destination, our worries and flaws would melt away in the Florida sun and life would be simply perfect, but things didn't quite go that way.

The trouble began as we left Alabama, I went to snap a picture of the "Entering Florida" sign (as I did with every other state we entered) just to find my battery was dead (in all four of my cameras). No big deal...right? That's what I thought too, until we arrived at NAS Pensacola and our luck didn't change for the better.

First, I should begin by explaining that I have a nonsensical fear of driving over any bridge with water under it. I tell Seth that I must've drowned in a past life and that a bridge and a car (and obviously water) must've had something to do with my death.

The feeling is indescribable but I'll try anyway; I panic, my heart races, I lower my head and close my eyes. I don't say a word. I don't think. I probably don't even breath. I just am. I sit and I wait. I wait for the "thud-thunk" sound that comes as the car crosses over the end of a bridge to the beginning of the actual road again, then I open my eyes and all is well, until, of course, we cross another bridge.

Well, what do you think we had to do to get to the main gate of NAS Pensacola? Cross a huge bridge with water under it.

My first thought? Fuck

Seth glanced over at me, grinned and chuckled a bit. I put my head down and waited for the thud-thunk.

After safely making it on base, we pulled up to a beautiful building that turned out to be lodging (which is basically a hotel, for all you nonmilitary folks) only to be told that, since we had a dog traveling with us, we needed to go to a different lodging facility down the street. They failed to mention to us that this new lodging facility was unimpressive, to say the least, and that they were going to charge us almost twice what we were going to be charged for our original room. Nevertheless, our 22 hour drive was over and we were thankful to have a bed to sleep in, so we grabbed our luggage and our pup and headed to our room.

The first thing I did when we got inside was put my purse down and take our dog outside to go potty. I went to the sliding door at the back of the room and struggled to open it. Now I don't know if our door was defective or if the architect simply intended to construct the sliding door so that only a 300 pound body-builder could open it, but I wrestled with it for a good five minutes to no avail. "You can do, put your back into it," I sang to myself as I swayed my hips and glanced at my puppy who was looking at me as if I was a nutcase. And I did it - using every last pound of my body weight as leverage.

So outside we went, me and my monster puppy (he weighs more than 100 lbs.), and as I'm standing there waiting for Bear to do his business it hits me how disgustingly humid it is. I'm not the outdoorsy-type so the humidity alone made me want to scrap the whole mission and get back inside to the air conditioning, but I patiently waited for my puppy to relieve himself.

But then I feel something - something on my leg, then my forehead, then my neck. Then I freak out because I realize I'm being bit by something. I walk towards the patio door to utilize the porch light and I see a swarm of mosquitos. I squeal - something I instantly do and cannot control when being attacked by a creature whose only mission in life is to find live prey and suck its blood.

I yell for Bear and haul ass to the patio door, all the while screaming as if I was at Camp Crystal Lake and I had just seen Jason Voorhees. The dog hauls ass towards me because he can tell I'm genuinely flipping out, I go to open the door and it doesn't fucking budge. It's ten o'clock at night, I'm jumping around and screaming like a mad woman while swatting at a swarm of mosquitos, my dog thinks I need committed and THE DOOR WON'T OPEN.

To make a long story short - I got the damn door open on my next try. Thank God for adrenaline.

I collapsed onto the bed out of sheer physical exhaustion and begin to tell Seth about my run-in with nature. He's chuckling while I'm telling him how I plan to go outside as little as possible from now on, when, mid-sentence, he stops laughing, his mouth drops and he says "Get up!" I follow his eyes behind me and I see the biggest spider known to man (okay, okay, slight exaggeration) on the bed, he grabs my sandal and murders the putrid thing and I instantly get goosebumps like never before. He comes back from flushing the dead spider and sits beside me on the edge of the bed. Everything just hit me at once and I started balling my eyes out.

My poor husband didn't have a single clue as to why I was crying, I could see the bewilderment in his face as he asked, "What's wrong babe?"

I couldn't find the words. It was everything and it was nothing. It seemed to be my dead camera batteries but that had nothing to do with it. It could've easily been the mosquito bites I got (and am allergic to) but that really wasn't it either. It was kinda-sorta-but-not-really the 15 ton sliding door that takes half an hour to open. It was but it wasn't the overpriced room we were staying in for God-knows-how-long. It wasn't even the gi-normous spider that just crawled out of the very sheets we were going to be sleeping in. It wasn't even the fact that we just traveled from one side of the country to the other in two days. Instead, I suppose it was all these things combined with the unknown, with not having any idea or control over what life was and is going to bring us. All we knew was to go to NAS Pensacola, and nothing more.

I didn't have the words to answer his question, so I just held on to him for dear life as he hugged me. When I finally pushed past "the ugly cry" and was able to catch my breath I told him I wanted "to go home." He didn't say a word, instead, he just looked at me and grinned and went back to holding me. I think he wanted to tell me what I immediately realized as soon as those words left my lips: we didn't have a home. Not at that moment and not that day and not even the next day. We were technically homeless. Almost all of our belongings were on a moving truck somewhere, a week's worth of clothes were in our suitcases, our laptops were in our backpacks and there was no house key on our keychains. We had no home.

But when I thought about it, none of that mattered because we had each other...we have each other. And I'll take that over a home any day.