Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe last morning of a trip has its own particular quiet. Nobody says it’s over, but everybody knows. After breakfast I went for a slow walk around the hotel. It wasn’t to see anything new. It was to look one more time at what I’d already seen, the way you look round a room before you switch the light off.
Anita stayed behind to pack, which she does far better than I do and with far less commentary. I came back to find the cases already closed and the job done.
Then the morning’s small miracle: Idlan was on time. Not nearly on time, and not on time by a generous reading of the clock. Actually ready, bag in hand, when we said we’d leave. I didn’t mention it, in case drawing attention to it broke the spell. Some things you just quietly enjoy.
We set off just after eleven. With an electric car, a long drive is really a series of short ones, joined together by charging stops. The first was Kuala Kangsar, where the plan was to have lunch while the car had its own. The town didn’t go along with that. Most of the restaurants were shut, and the ones that weren’t didn’t look keen on visitors. So the car charged and we stayed hungry, and lunch moved down the road to the R&R at Sungai Perak. It wasn’t the meal we’d pictured, but an R&R lunch has never claimed to be anything grander. It fed us, and that was all we asked of it.
Then came Tapah. A lorry had broken down somewhere ahead, and for nearly an hour the whole highway seemed to be thinking about it. We moved slowly, then stopped, then moved a little and stopped again. You can’t hurry a jam like that, and you can’t blame anyone in it. Everyone is just sitting in their own car, losing the same afternoon together. The radio ran out of things to say. So, for a while, did we.
By the time we reached KL it was almost Maghrib. The light was going soft, the streetlamps were coming on, and the city looked the way it always does when you come back: louder than you remember, and somehow still home.
There was one more charge to do before we were properly home, at the charger near the house. It felt like a small last chore, the car topping up while the rest of us ran on empty.
It was a tiring day, and not because of any one thing. It was the miles, the waiting and the stopping, piling up slowly. That’s how journeys home usually go. The trip itself gets the photos. The drive back gets an aching back and a quiet car.
Work tomorrow. The cases can wait until morning. Tonight the only plan is to stop moving.