We have the weirdest life…

On Friday, Sunny had a 2pm appointment in Charleston to get her Visa. It's a l-o-n-g drive.

Because Sunny works nights and was scheduled to work the night before, she took the day off so we could get some sleep the night before.

According to Google Maps, the drive was supposed to take four hours, so we figured we'd leave the house at 8am, which gave us two extra hours in case there was traffic and we had difficulty finding the place. Missing the appointment wasn't an option. Missing it meant starting the process over again (which also means coming up with another thousand dollars)… and we'd been stung by Google's travel time estimates before.

So, the plan was take the night off, get some sleep, drive to Charleston, arrive about an hour before we needed to, get the appointment over and done with, maybe grab something to eat and head home.

The first spanner in the words came in the form of our body-clocks and Lucy-Fur, our cat. Sunny and I are both nocturnal. Trying to go to sleep when you're usually just getting going for the day is a problem. It wasn't helped by the fact that, just as we were falling asleep, Lucy decided it would be fun to climb up on top of a high piece of furniture next to the bed, and do a daring double back-flip onto the bed. Having a furry bowling ball land on your head just as you're starting to float off doesn't do much to help you sleep.

By 4am, we gave up and got out of bed.

We set off bang on schedule at 8am and, for once, Google was spot on…and even though we stopped on the way a good few times, we pulled into the parking lot at exactly noon.

Now, before we'd left, Sunny had told me about a seafood place (Charleston is right on the coast) that we could go get lunch at. I'd told her lunch was doubtful…dinner maybe, but not lunch. From my own Visa experience I knew that if they said you have a 2pm appointment, they really mean about ten or twenty people have a 2pm appointment. I figured we'd get in at 2, sit around for a couple of hours, finally get seen, and probably get out at around 4-5.

Instead, we arrived at 12, went into the building to find the suite we needed to go to, they told us there was no need to wait and we were done and back in the car at 12:15.

So we went and had lunch. Water's Edge in Charleston is a good place to eat. The food was good, and we were at a table overlooking the water. We could see dolphins swimming alongside the boats coming into the harbor and pelicans scavenging for food. Unfortunately, our waiter was a bit of an asshole. You know those waiters who try to be way too friendly? This guy was the exact opposite of that.

Trust me, waiter guy…when the most expensive thing on your menu is twelve bucks, you don't get to act that snooty and stuck up. I don't care if waiting tables is what you're doing until your movie career takes off, when I ask you for a refill on my diet coke, I'm asking you to walk to the soda fountain, not take the one ring to Mordor.

Anyway, we finished lunch and wanted to go for a walk around the bay, but it was oppressively hot a humid, at least 100 degrees and humid enough to make my glasses steam up when I got out of the car. So we decided to have a drive around instead.

By 3pm we were on our way home, but having been up for nearly 30 hours after just 4 hours sleep was starting to show. After sitting in the car with the A/C full blast and loud music on the radio for what felt like 12 hours, I looked at the GPS to see we still had nearly 150 miles to go. Realizing that if we carried on we'd end up at the ER or the funeral parlor instead of home, we pulled into a Days Inn and got a room for the night.

Well, I say 'for the night'. We checked in at around 5pm and fell asleep almost immediately…well, Sunny did. A few days ago my headphones for the PC finally crapped out, after having one headphone held on with duct tape for about six months, the left speaker finally stopped working, so after our meeting, we'd stopped at a CVS to get something to drink, and I bought a pair of cheap noise cancelling headphones…so for half an hour after Sunny had fallen asleep, in my sleep deprived delirium I sat in the room like a lunatic, turning the headphones on and off: "Now I can hear the air conditioner <click> now I can't <click> now I can <click> now I can't."

What can I say? I'm easily amused. The sound quality wasn't as good as my old headphones (I didn't expect them to be, considering they were about 1/5^th the price of my old ones)…but the sound cancelling feature and compact, fold-down design will make them perfect for our eventual plane flight.

We were awake again at 1am…so we went for breakfast at a nearby Waffle House, watched a crappy movie in the motel room, and finally decided to head for home at 4am.

So our plan was to drive to our appointment, be there for a few hours, grab lunch, drive back.

Instead, we drove to our appointment which took 15 minutes instead of two hours, watched porpoises while eating shrimp, drove around looking at rich-people houses on the beach, spent an unscheduled night in a motel…and drove back home at 4am.

One thing I can say about life with Sunny…it's never predictable.

(Oh, and PS…I just uploaded Episode 3 of our podcast…you can find it at www.watermelonhelmet.mypodcast.com, or just search the iTunes store for 'Watermelon Helmet'…we think this is our best episode by far. Go give it a listen.)