Road Trip to Epiphany

Picking up from the last post…

…here I was, on a forced road trip to Los Angeles. I had just enough in the bank to cover gas and food for the trip. As a new Canadian immigrant I had no credit, so I had recently gotten a prepaid credit card. That was my only life line for the 30 hour road trip.

I needed internet to access money so I bought a Starbucks gift card in order to use the wifi at Starbucks, they’re everywhere. (At that time you needed a gift card to get 2 hours of wifi.) I had to use the internet and transfer funds from my bank account to my prepaid card twice for gas and food. Since I was there, I got coffee to keep me up for the drive.

And thank God I brought my laptop AND power chord!! It would’ve been much more of an interesting challenge without that. The laptop was my source of communication and access to money. If it wasn’t for Lisa’s suggestion to bring it I would’ve been really screwed!

All the usual items I’d take with me to LA weren’t with me this time – U.S. cellphone, U.S. keys and bank cards, cash and of course clothes and toiletries.

Despite the madness, I was actually in pretty good spirit. I had been intending a trip to LA for a while. It just wasn’t under these crazy circumstances.

As soon as I crossed the border, I popped in a cd on personal development. I wasn’t in the mood for music. It seemed like the perfect time for my “university on wheels”. I listened to self help cd’s (like Tony Robbins) almost the whole drive. Between listening to cd’s, I sang to keep myself awake and entertained. Good thing I was alone!

When I got through Seattle the rain was clearing up and sun came out again. Around that time I had sort of an epiphany, an ‘aha moment’.

The last time I made a road trip by myself from Vancouver to LA was on my 30^th birthday, 30 months ago, in the same car and again under a forced and unexpected circumstance.

At that time I made the trip cause Lisa wasn’t allowed to enter the States. This time I was making the trip cause my car wasn’t permitted in Canada.

It was the 30 hour drive that symbolized the culmination of the last 30 months.

In order to understand, we need to go back a few years in time.

Flashback to 2006….

….we’ll have to pick this up in the next post!

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