Road Trip (with mom)

September 16th

After 7 hours of driving, we arrived in Rzeszów. We — I mean me and my mom. It might be surprising to take mom as a companion on a road trip but she wanted to visit a city where she went to college and hasn’t been back in 52 years. I have never been to Rzeszów myself, so we decided to go on a long weekend trip there. Drive went fine, my mom is a very good passenger — we talked when we wanted, we didn’t when we didn’t want to, we took several detours to see something off the planned way, we found a common interest in criticizing local architecture and local gardens we could see from the car. Mom told me a lot about her time in college in the 60s, some stuff that I already knew, some brand new information that I cannot wait to share with my brother and sister.

My mom almost cried and got very emotional when she saw her old college building and her old residence hall — apparently they haven't changed much in 52 years. At first, she had trouble orientating in the city (which is not surprising since A LOT had changed since she graduated). But after half an hour she could remember a lot of details, even some shortcuts in the Old Town that it seems are still in use after all those years. Overall it was a very good day, but now we both can feel the tiredness of driving and walking around the city.

For me It is a different kind of tiredness than what I wrote about yesterday — I feel good about being tired this way, I kind of feel invigorated by being tired like I am today. That probably doesn't make much sense but bear with me — I am tired because of work I did today for myself and my benefit and all that work brought happiness to my mom (and me). That is joyful tiredness and I don’t mind it at all.