And I'm in the Bleachers

Part 1 - Journey + Arrival

Forty-five minutes after we pull out of the hotel parking lot, Dad takes a toll ticket as we enter the Pennsylvania Turnpike. An hour later, there's a sign for a service plaza that has a Starbucks, and the coffee gene kicks in. "Can we stop for coffee, please?" Pilar asks, pulling an air pod out of her left ear.

"Huh?" my dad says, glancing in the rearview mirror.

"Coffee. There's a Starbucks at the plaza."

"Oh, yeah, sure," he says, and he merges into the right lane.

It takes maybe fifteen minutes for us to all get coffee and use the bathroom and then we're back on the road. "Only a little over two hours," my mom announces as she restarts the GPS. There's a whole lot of nothing out the windows until just over an hour later. It's almost noon and we're almost to an exit for Carlisle. We get through the town and then there's fields for a few more miles before we're in another town that I couldn't tell you the name of because there's not an exit. This one seems to bleed into the next one and then we're crossing a river.

My mom glances at the GPS again. "Forty minutes!"

"Should we stop for lunch or just wait until we get there?" my dad asks. I look at the time. It's twelve-thirty.

"Let's wait until we're off the toll road," my mom says. "We can stop somewhere in our new town."

My dad nods awkwardly and keeps driving. "We're the next exit," he says. There's a little bit of town on the other side of the river, but then it's open land again. A combination of fields and forest. Twenty more minutes and we're getting off at an exit that appears to be in the middle of literal nowhere but says it's for Lancaster/Lebanon. We turn left and we're literally driving into a forest. A few miles later, we take an exit to the right for route three-twenty-two that says Ephrata. "That's us!" my dad says. I'm not sure if he's actually excited or just pretending to be, but honestly, I kind of am. I'm not only ready to be out of this car, but I'm ready to actually see this place in person rather than in pictures and on video chat.

Less than ten minutes later and we're finally out of the woods. Granted, we still seem to be in the middle of nowhere. There's not much of anything, but at least there are houses instead of trees along the road. Five minutes after that, there's an ice cream shop on the left and it looks like it must be pretty good because the parking lot is almost completely full.

"Would it be terrible if we have ice cream for lunch?" my dad asks.

"Absolutely not!" I say. Everyone laughs, and he turns into the parking lot. The ice cream is actually amazing, and it turns out they have food, too, so we don't have to actually eat ice cream for lunch. We're there for maybe half an hour before my mom says we should go so we can unpack, and my dad agrees so we go back to the car.

It's less than ten minutes later when my dad parks on a street across from some apartment buildings. "This is it Salazars!" he says, and we all get out of the car.

"Ooh, Armando!" my mom says, and I'm not sure if she's serious or not. "It looks nice! What a great building! I think we're gonna be really happy here." My dad puts his arm around her shoulders.

Pilar is holding her phone to her ear when she walks up next to me from the other side of the car, and I guess she's talking to Eric. "I miss you so much. I would crawl back to Texas on broken glass just to have five more minutes with you."

"Pilar, say goodbye to your boyfriend," my mom says. "I'm trying to have a nice family moment here."

"My kidnappers are making me hang up," she says into the phone. "Send help." Then I watch as she ends the call.

"Hey, can you cheer up?" I tell her. "Maybe Pennsylvania won't be so bad."

"Mom and Dad made me move fifteen hundred miles away from the love of my life. If you had a girlfriend, you'd understand."