Leaving on a jet plane

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And so for the second time in my life I find myself leaving for the California desert to go work on a car that drives itself. It is a strange circumstance, made even stranger by the fact that I worry more about how I'm going to do laundry (the Mojave laundromat is sketchy) than I do about the car passing me at 30 with nobody at the wheel. Pete commented the other day about a phone call from the company shipping our car:

Driver: "so wait... I'm arriving at the Seneca Army Depot at noon to pick up two robotic cars?"
Pete: "Yep."

So to me at least, the bizarre is normal and vice-versa. I like it that way. In fifty years' time I want to be able to tell this story to my grandkids- about the summers I spent in that weird place called California (which will be weird because it sank into the ocean twenty years prior), how cars weren't always able to drive themselves, how we were some of the first to try to change that, and how that four year adventure was just the beginning. Funny how I tend to think about the future only when it is least certain.

Anyway, as I was dropping my girlfriend off last night she said, "drive safely." I must admit with a wry smile that the first thing that popped into my mind was, "it will."