I guess we should have made an offering somewhere

My cousin, a frequent international traveller, maintains that smooth travel is more likely to occur when you make regular prayers and sacrifices to the Magical Flying Pony Unicorn Gods of Travel. This is apparently a piece of nonsense I should have been paying more attention to before this trip. I've been away for home for not quite three weeks, and my husband for four. In that time:

-We've had rental car trouble. They wouldn't rent him the car, it had to be replaced by a new one in Ohio, Andrew got a ticket, and he had to have a decent-sized fight about the bill when he returned.

-As previously discussed, we had to cancel all the credit cards. (And the cat had to spend the whole vacation in a cone.) From the amount of complaining she's been doing, she clearly feels that she is suffering beyond the limits of the Geneva Conventions.

-On my way to a conference in Maine (right after my family vacation) I got hit with a double whammy of bad weather and mechanical failure, which resulted in an overnight in Philadelphia. I learned the lesson that once the airline has your suitcase en route, they're not giving it back. So I was late to the conference, and arrived looking a bit rumpled on top of it.

-The motorcycle developed an oil leak somewhere in South Carolina.

-On my way back from the conference, another flight was cancelled. I was confident that this time, just like last time, I would get a hotel voucher, because both flight cancellations were due to mechanical difficulties. I was informed, however, that the situation had not been officially labelled a "mechanical failure" but rather an "inability to get the aircraft from one location to another." Read those words again: an "inability to get the aircraft from one location to another" means the airplane couldn't fly because it couldn't fly.

So I thought I'd be at home tonight, cuddling the cat and drinking wine with my husband. Instead I'm in Maine, eating takeout pizza and writing you all. In spite of it all, it's been a good trip. I took part in a brilliant conference, visited practically every relative I have, and drank a whole lot of beer. Life isn't too bad.