Day 14: Nope Nope Nope

“The risk I took was calculated, but man am I bad at math.”

I'm sure whoever is reading this is probably sick of reading about my bad days. All I have to say is try this yourself and then talk to me. I am so done. I'm 1 day and 18 hours away from Seattle, which works out to be about 5 days of driving away. But Rachel, this is the experience of a lifetime, just keep going, you'll be fine. While all that may be true, I don't care. I never realized how much I rely on other people and without them, I'm just falling apart.

It took about 7.5 hours to drive to New Orleans last night. I booked a room that had good reviews and it was within 10 minutes driving of where I wanted to go. I got here around 11pm and drove down the street to where it was and I'm pretty sure there were 3 or 4 prostitutes on the corner. I pull into the parking lot and I'm saying to myself “give it a chance, it could be fine”. To get in you have to ring a doorbell, the front desk woman let me in. She was behind a solid sheet of glass, like at a bank, it's still ok, I tell myself. I check in and get my key and walk up the stairs to my room. The carpet looks like it's from the 70s and the sheets were stained. Alright, you can deal with this, no big deal. Then I go into the bathroom to put my toiletry bag in there and I see a roach on the wall. Not a tiny baby roach, a full grown adult roach about 2 inches long. I'm from the NW and have apparently been pretty lucky so far because I've never had to deal with roaches ever. I start crying and freaking out, so I call my friend Ashley. As she's trying to calm me down I see it come out of the bathroom and grab a trash can to try and kill it. The asshole fell on the ground and went against the wall and I couldn't reach it with the garbage can so I grabbed the first thing I saw which was a toilet brush and smashed the hell out of that thing. I'm really glad that Ashley was on the phone with me, she took me from crying to laughing and stayed on the phone with me for over an hour.

Needless to say I don't want to stay here another night. I'm planning on exploring New Orleans for the day and then heading out. I'm ready to go home. The best laid plans often go awry, and while seemingly a good idea, this trip has been awry all over the place. I will still be a better person for doing this, I'm still not sure what I've learned, but maybe that revelation will come later. I did have some damn good barbecue yesterday, so there's that.