T-minus 20 hours..Houston you have a problem

After a long month in Ohio with family and friends it was time to pack our bags, shove 'em in the car (which we have gotten really good at), and tune the GPS to Houston, Texas. We waited alllll day to leave, stuffed our faces with delicious stromboli and headed to our first stop about an hour away, Columbus, OH at the James Cancer Hospital. We made it in approximately 62 minutes (the 2 minutes was a pit stop for our first free Starbucks, mmmhmmhmh). Anyways, Mike promised us an entire bag of chocolate covered espresso beans from West Virginia ..probably the best source of caffeine a night shifter could ask for. When we excitedly found Mike working hard our excitement turned into complete depression, disbelief, disappointment, and a real downer. MIKE FORGOT THE BEANS! Mike was felt so bad when he saw our sad puppy faces that he raced to his locker and scavenged through it to find about 30 beans left in his stash. He handed them over no questions asked and apologized frantically...we are not exaggerating this at all, this really did happen.

It was down to business then being already 8:00PM we had to get on the road for real and get to Houston. So we buckled in and drove on. The first 10 hours were a breeze as we caught up on the last month activites away from each other.. The coffee and chicken pills helped. But soon all hell broke loose...

Around 7AM with five hours to go we made a desperate stop at a McDonalds to refuel not only the car but ourselves. Note to self: when you are bored and need a quick jolt of entertainment stop in the smallest town and find yourself a McDonalds. We just needed to fill our coffee mugs and we were willing to pay a total of only $2 with our 2 McDonalds gift certificates...they had free refills so we couldn;t possibly buy the amount of coffee needed to fill our mugs when you could get it for frree. Soooo the manager didn;t like the plan we proposed to them to just fill us up instead of us having to keep going to the counter for free refills, so we had to get a cup dump it in our mug and then go back and ask for more..at this point everyone is looking at us strangely ..

But as we sipped our coffee (that ended up being about 50% free) we realized that we are strange but everyone else is stranger!
This is what we saw:

1. Miss Queen Latiffa was the manager..and was not friendly
2. Normal towns use Starbucks for free Wi-fi but this towns hot spot happened to be McDonalds
3. We promise there was a lot more things, but we were too delusional to remember them alllll

As the drive down south continued on we noticed that the temperature nicely increased assuring us that we were almost there. We pulled up into our new apartment complex and looked at each other with blood shot eyes, scrubby ass clothes, and matted hair and said "Welcome home! Let's go check in!" Now we hoped that this would be a fast check in but once again we were wrong. We meandered around trying to find a non locked bathroom while the check in man ignored us. After about 15 minutes with our knees locked nearly doing the potty dance he unlocked the restroom, we think he thought we were homeless people off the streets..but we explained to him we are just the traveling nurses. Then he chauffeured us to our new apt and showed us around. And man was it nice!

   

Before we could even think about unpacking we had to address the lack of food consumption. Without changing or cleaning ourselves up we headed to the corner eatery and ordered take out...However, fresh frozen Margaritas were staring us in the face so we were responsible and ordered just one to split. So now we looked like homeless lesbians. This towns first impression of us is a doozy! Feeling a little light headed from our half margarita and lack of sleep we tried to find our way out of the parking lot. Just as we are making headway and we see an exit we get flagged down by none other than the Houston police. In defense mode Jenn rolled down her window and started yelling that we were new to town and we need to get to the apartment complex across the street... She quickly realized how dumb that sounded so she threw in "Are U-Turns legal in this town?" The officer looked baffled and said "O I was just going to help you find a parking spot, but yeah unless marked otherwise you can make a U-Turn". With that we rolled up the window, made it to the apartment, and locked ourselves in. Clearly we should not have been in a public place at this time.

The next four days were consumed by nothing but work..UGH! If you know anything about us you know we don't work 4 days a week or day shift..sooo this was a loooooong week! We basically stared at a computer screen, drank coffee, and made a couple new friends. The only break in the day was watching the monsoon rain fall and hearing all the staff call off...what have we gotten ourselves into?

By the third day, we begged for a tour of the ginormous hospital that is MD Anderson #1 Cancer Hospital in the world. We got the tour and were told that we would not be working with surgical patients but rather Leukemia patients...SURPRISE! Chemo and blood administration here we come! Stay tuned i'm sure there will be good stories to follow...

We have been here for nearly a week and have done nothing but work so we decided it is time for a road trip...look out Austin we are headed your way with some extra travelers!