This morning I was talking to the pleasant young man who answered the phone at the motel in Monterey where my California Lit class stayed two weeks ago--have I lost you yet?--when he started apologizing for the weather. "I'm sorry you had such bad weather for your trip," he said, but I quickly corrected him: in a full week in San Francisco, Monterey, and environs, we got rained on only once.
"Well, it's done nothing but rain since you left," he pointed out, and he's right. I see in the news that Highway 1 to Big Sur is closed in places because of flooding, and those rich farm fields we viewed near Salinas are turning to mud. Let's give a gold star to whoever was responsible for the planning the weather on our class trip!
I'm not sure yet whether I'll get a gold star for planning the budget on the trip. In fact, I called Monterey this morning in order to ask about a discrepancy I discovered while assembling my receipts to submit to the business office: my college credit card was charged nine cents more than the amount shown on the motel's receipt. The two of us put our heads together but still couldn't figure out where the nine cents came from, and eventually I realized that the long-distance phone call was going to cost more than the nine cents I was trying to track down.
On Monday I'll submit this big batch of receipts, reports, and spreadsheets to the business office and the other entities with an interest in the trip. We were fortunate enough to get funding from several different sources, so I'll spend the afternoon Monday trotting around campus spreading joy in the form of receipts, one off by nine cents and one written entirely in some variety of Chinese and one almost entirely blank. Planning this kind of trip is an adventure in itself--one that doesn't stop until long after we've arrived back home.
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