It was a very good trip, albeit short-ish and seriously hot. Driving 6 hours in August in the South is not the time to discover that your car's A/C isn't fully up to the task. The ride up was seriously grueling, a LONG and grumpy sauna because we drove during the worst heat of the day. When we discovered that adding refrigerant wasn't going to magically fix it, we left at 6:15 a.m. to come back to Florida, and thank the gods we did, because only the last 2 hours or so were sweaty ones.
Poor Lil Sis was fighting a severe sinus infection that's lasted 2 weeks, but she put her big girl pants on, as she puts it, and drove us around on Monday, giving us a quick guided tour of downtown Charlotte and parts south. It was interesting, because something occurred that I wasn't expecting...the feeling that I don't want to live so close to so large a city...or rather, that a suburb of Charlotte rather than Charlotte proper is looking better and better. I'm just not a big city person, and thanks to some serious expansion and aesthetic renderings in the last decade, Charlotte is just that. I had forgotten that Charlotte became the East Coast finance hub post-9/11, because both Bank of America and Wachovia have their corporate HQs there, so a large chunk of NY's money men relocated while the country scrambled to maintain stability...and the city evolved to accommodate those individuals, in the hopes of winning some of them as residents (which also happened in surprising numbers, if you believe the statistic). Not saying I don't want to move there, if that's where I'm able to find work...gotta remember that what's important is just getting the hell out of Florida. But the shiny wore off the city, and I'm able to look at it critically and question it. Yes, a large city is where the jobs are, but in this economy, any move is a crap shoot, and I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been trying hard enough.
Brought my camera and didn't take a single picture...they're all in my head. Doesn't make this post more exciting, but does allow me to scroll back through the weekend and make fresh lists and talk to Husby about what I want out of this move. Husby's a loving sheep; he'll go wherever I drag him, but I've heard him complain about Aiken's size and quaintness (though I'm sure his beratement of the town has more to do with him not being able to imagine living in the same town as his folks, b/c their home life is such a cluster)...but of course, I want him happy too, after the initial freakout about uprooting us has worn off.
We can go up again in 2 weeks in conjunction with an SC trip...thinkingthinkingthinking...
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