Going To California - Day 4 - Flagstaff to Bakersfield

Departure Flagstaff - 35 degrees and clear
Arrival Bakersfield - 82 degrees and clear

Sundown - 4:48 pm
Miles Traveled - 482 miles
States Visited - 2
Major Cities - Ummmm...
Average speed - 70 mph

A Sampling of Gas Prices
$2.11 Kingman, AZ
$3.29 Bullhead City, CA
$2.25 Junction of Hwys. 395 & 58
$1.99 Bakersfield, CA



One of the things that's both neat and frightening about growing up is you start to deal with your parents as adults. Rather you're dealing with them for the first time as an adult yourself. In fact it may be the first time you get to talk with them about grown up stuff at all.

Since thirty is just up around the bend for me I'm actively working on redefining my individual relationships with my parents. I want to reset the structure of our realtionships to accomodate two adults instead of one adult and one "child." More importantly I want to actually know my parents. Neither of them are particularly old and we'll have at least another thirty to forty years together. Up until now they've had to be models from which I might base my behavior. But now that I'm pretty much a fully-formed adult I can look and see them as they are.

More importantly, if your family was nuclear like mine, these are the two people who have ostensibly known you for the longest. They were the ones who can tell you the most about who you were before you remembered and even tell you a lot about the stuff you do remember except from an adult's perspective. They really are the mirror of your experiences and if they are honest and respectful of you they can tell you more about yourself than any other person not walking around in your skin.

So when I was having dinner with my mom last night, we just talked like I normally would with any other adult in my life. We talked about the election, we talked about my sister's wedding, we talked about my upcoming job prospects. But mostly we talked about each other and ourselves. That is to say we talked as adults.