Leaving your family to fend for themselves during a major illness sucks. Waiting in line 45 minutes just to get through airport security sucks. A two-hour layover at Washington Dulles sucks. An hour-long flight delay sucks. Waiting 30 minutes for your baggage only to find that it’d arrived on an earlier flight and had been sitting in the overflow area the whole time sucks. But finally getting back home is awesome.
I had three months’ worth of luggage and was feeling wacky, so I decided to take a cab back from the airport. The driver was silent except for saying that the door didn’t work so I had to get in from the other side. The entire drive he listened to crappy house music on the stereo and bobbed his head to the beat like a rooster, all the while swerving from lane to lane and cutting people off.
As soon as we got on 101 and I saw the sign for Monster Park, I knew I was finally home. A while ago I voted for that pointless referendum to keep it named Candlestick, but there’s something inexplicably cool about seeing a freeway sign for Monster Park.
Even though I know it’s named after a ridiculous company that’s made a fortune selling overpriced pieces of wire, and that there’s years of history attached to the name Candlestick, nothing says “home” like driving up the freeway and getting an image of Godzilla and King Ghidra duking it out on island across the bay.