Departure

ItascaTravels2017

Thursday, Jan 12 (in media res)…

Yesterday, at the stroke of noon, I joyously clicked PUBLISH to send 17 days of text and photos out to the world. Nothing happened. I clicked again—maybe on a different icon, maybe not. (But not, I assure you, on DELETE). All I remember is seeing the screen go blank.

There were tears… and a long walk.

My techie children assure me that all that work has to be somewhere (and Amy’s hubby is trying to sort out what happened), but I’m starting over with today (which is actually a pretty boring day so far). Assuming the original posts are lost, my plan is to re-create one original day with each current post –and have Amy walk me through every step of posting/publishing.

Post Mortem: It took 2 days to reset the blog site and determine that all the previous content was indeed gone. So I begin again, with the same disclaimer as before: When I blog, I’m not wearing my editor’s hat. 

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Backstory in brief:  Since October we’d been plagued pestered, beset by mechanical issues large and small, and the motorhome (MH) finally returned from the shop about 3pm Christmas Eve. (Yes, we were planning to depart shortly after church Christmas morning. You do the math.)

Thanks to son Chris (who is enjoying/ maintaining the house in our absence), we had a nice chunk of prime rib in the oven, and Warren, Erica, and Amy (w/stuffed baked potatoes 😃) – plus one spouse, one significant other, one grandchild, and one niece – joined us later for dinner and a light-hearted gift exchange. Pre- and post- these festivities, Greg and I were busy lugging items from the staging table and stashing them somewhere (key word) in the MH. When guests had gone, we loaded up the dishwasher, hand washed what fit in the drying rack, and left the rest for morning.

My personal plan was simply to stay up forever and finish loading, but my body (and Greg’s) spoke forcefully in opposition. Sunday morning the rest of the dishes get done, I’m at church at 8:15 (choir warm-up) and home again about 10:30. Our mattress gets moved into the MH (not going to give that up for a year!), we scarf down some roast beef sandwiches, and I try to get the rest of the house in decent order. (I think I actually did 3 quick loads of wash – sheets, towels, and mattress pad - so I could store those at home.) There was also a lot that didn’t get done… the floors may not be really clean again ‘til the end of Jan when our housekeeping neighbor checks in.

We actually pulled out just about 3pm (24-hour turnaround – not bad). With some disbelief (Are we really doing this?) and some almost-tears on both sides, we were off.

MH and Toad

Sunday, Dec 25…

It’s Christmas Day, so freeway traffic is sparse. Our original plan had been to head down somewhere around Centralia and spend the night in a Walmart lot.  Somewhere along the way, Greg changed that to the Salem, OR area (which was in fact an excellent idea, but it made for a much longer drive than I was anticipating). Once we passed Portland, our tummies started to rumble. Now there’s plenty of food in the MH but we’re not up to actually fixing even a simple meal. We’ll settle for Mickey D’s, as long as we don’t have to do anything except hand over cash.

It’s Christmas Day.  Do you know how many ordinary restaurants are open Christmas Day? We’re on a major freeway, with lots of retail access. We’d pull into a shopping area w/ several restaurants – all dark.  A couple fast-food places were open, sort of – a motorhome doesn’t really do drive-thru very well. (There was also a recurring sign for “Shari’s- next exit.” By now we knew it wouldn’t be open anyway, but we never, ever saw the building.)  Eventually (after we’d found a Walmart on the outskirts of Salem) we made more roast beef sandwiches, which tasted way better than Mickey D’s.

(It was actually prettier than this.)

BlogThoughts (stuff I jotted own as we drove)… Rainier at sunset is an absolute feast for the eyes – and we only saw half of it! Clouds obscured the top, but the soft pink glow of the fading sunlight against the silvery white slopes was ethereal.