I packed my bags and headed for Texas after two hours of deliberation. My house mate's comment that I would "never" go to Texas got me moving. Another factor that had a lot to do with my decision to take off for Texas was that I had been thinking that maybe being with my ex-boyfriend would be better than being alone. I still wasn't having any luck finding Mr. Wonderful.
I drove south and stopped in to see my mom to say goodbye. She told me that my ex-boyfriend had called and told her to tell me that I better call him when I got there. My response was, "Yeah right, like that's going to happen."
After leaving moms, I went over to my grandmother's. God love her, she fed me some of her fantastic homemade chicken and noodles before I left.
Many years after I left Iowa, I saw a comedian on television that was also from Iowa. He had moved to San Francisco. He said that he was shocked to find that there was no one at the border to stop him from leaving. I could relate to that. I hated living in Iowa, but at times it felt that I couldn't leave.
I was on the road by 9:00 p.m. and the only time I stopped along the way was to get gas and junk food to keep me going on my trip. I drove 20 hours straight. When I got to the border of Oklahoma and Texas, I thought, "Thank God, I'm almost there." Wrong. I had no idea how big Texas was.
When I got to Waco, I asked the man in the gas station I stopped at, "Where is San Antonio." He laughed and told me that I still had about 180 more miles to go. During those 20 hours, 12 hours was spent driving through Texas.
I arrived at the city limits for San Antonio at about 5 p.m. the next day. When I saw the population was over a million people, I couldn't believe it. This was the biggest city I had ever been in during in my life.
When I left Iowa the temperature was in the 30s. When I arrived in Texas, the temperature was in the 80s. There was a pool at the apartment complex where my brother and his wife lived. I decided to take a dip one day. I went out and dived in head first and came up out of the water yelling, "Holy Shit!" There was a guy up on a balcony above the pool. He found my dive into the pool and my response very funny. I didn't know that the pool wasn't heated and the water was very cold.
A new chapter of my life was beginning and I dived into it like I dived into that water. I didn't check the temperature; I just dived in head first.
Living in Texas was my first taste of real freedom in my life. I figured a few things out during my years there. One of those things was that I could take care of myself. My family had me convinced that I needed someone to take care of me. My brother actually told me that one day. I don't know where he got his ideas and I took great delight in proving him and others in my family wrong.
(To be continued...)
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