My last few days in Michigan, before I move to California, have been good ones. I've gone with friends to new places and old ones, run into people unexpectedly, packed my last few things, said my goodbyes. (There's nothing especially interesting here, be warned.)
Tuesday morning I spent preparing to leave, and then around 2:30 I headed out to Michigan State campus to pick up Laura A. She and I went to an arcade in Okemos. We played skee-ball, air hockey, silly carnival games for nearly an hour.
Then we went to Grand Ledge to walk and climb around the ledges for a while. This is a bit of a cliché because I went there with Sarah earlier this summer, but I didn't really get my fill of it then, and Laura hadn't ever been there. We looked around for almost an hour, and then we had to leave in order to meet Jeremy at a restaurant.
Unfortunately we had become a bit lost in the meantime so it took us a while to our way out of the ledges area to the parking lot. We were a few minutes late at Dok Sing, our favorite local Chinese and Thai restaurant, but Jeremy was still there, eating soup. Dinner was good, and then I took Laura back to campus.
I stopped by fencing practice just to say goodbye to everyone, without taking my fencing equipment. To my surprise, coach Dale was there, too, and he had brought along Caroline, who plays Queen Elizabeth at the Renaissance Festival. Caroline is a professional actor, and, as it turns out, she has taken fencing lessons in order to further her stage combat skills. She worked out with the group a little, but for a long time we sat and talked. She knows several languages, including French and Russian. She's working on her whip skills for a show on Thursday morning where she plays one of four Zorros. We exchanged faire anecdotes (most of them hers). After practice Dale and Caroline and I went out to dinner. I'm going to miss Dale, and Caroline too.
Wednesday I spent most of the day on final preparations, and then in the evening I gave Tim D. a call. He's a busy guy, with school and his job (designing and maintaining Novell networks) and his new activity, bowling. He was going bowling again tonight, so I went along and bowled a game, too, with Lewis E. and his girlfriend Laura. Afterward I briefly stopped by fencing practice to say hi to Jeff P., but he wasn't there. I went home, finished writing my RenFest diary entry, posted it, and went to bed.
Thursday morning I got up, showered, and my dad drove me out to Lansing airport, where I checked in. I was wearing my MSU Fencing jacket and an MSU Fencing t-shirt, just on the off-chance of problems with checking in a bag full of swords. Oddly enough, it actually worked the other way: the airline agent checking me in commented ``Do you do the sword-fighting game at that festival?'' and I told her about bunny fencing at RenFest. She even asked if the festival was still going on. Sheesh.
I had to be at the airport 2 hours early for ``security'' reasons, but in fact I was through security in a couple of minutes. So now I'm sitting here in the gate lounge typing this on my laptop, plugged into a handy wall socket, with another hour and a half to wait for my flight. Who knows when this'll actually be posted...