Here There and Everywhere

Lost My Way :-)

Aren’t vacations great? I had such great plans; travel to all these fun spots AND read two books I have to have read by the time I get home AND do Trip Advisor reviews AND tell you about my trip on this blog.

Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahaha.

I managed to read one New Yorker on my flight from Atlanta to Portland.

I managed to blog in Portland.

I even managed an entry or two in Seattle, where we were spending time with my Mom, who had been hospitalized the previous month with a particularly nasty bout of influenza, suffered two subsequent rounds of pneumonia and a couple small strokes. She was in rehab, re-gaining her strength, and shortly after I left, she returned to her home. My Mama has some amazing resiliency. She is 94, and she still has all her marbles. I am learning a lot about what having great genes and living a long life can mean – it takes courage. Mom has that in spades.

Once AdventureMan and I got on the road, however, I just don’t know where the time went. Certainly, I didn’t MAKE room to keep up with the blogging. We usually landed where we were headed mid-afternoon, and would explore. Then I would take a look at the next day, and AdventureMan would take a look at the map and we would plot our course. Then . . . sometimes we would take a nap before dinner. Sometimes we might take a walk. And then, by the time we finished dinner, had figured our what we might need for the next day (for example, we each had a medium sized bag, but some places we stayed didn’t have elevators, so we would repack what we needed for that night in a smaller bag and tote that in, rather than tote everything.

In the Fred Meyer’s in Lynnwood, we had found a noodle, so if a hotel had a pool, we toted the noodle in, too. It’s cheap, and it really makes for good exercise, and at the end, you can put it in the recycle and maybe someone else can use it.

So sometimes we would also tote in the noodle.

We also had emergency supplies: a bag of Halo’s (small seedless tangerines), dark chocolate, rice crackers, a bag of peanut M&Ms for AdventureMan (even the smell of them makes me gag), ginger candy for me. Mostly that stayed in the back seat unless we were staying two days or there was no breakfast included.

We quickly discovered our rental car, a Nissan Altima, had no pick up at all. Going up the twisty turny roads on Highway 1 and California 1, the car would go slower and slower. It was like navigating an ocean going vessel. We love our agile little Rav 4’s. We joke that we are a Rav 16 family; between the four adults in Pensacola, we have four Rav 4s. It is agile and fuel efficient, and comfortable for long drives. The Altima . . . is not any of those things.

Please pardon the two week interruption while we voyaged. I will start to catch you up now, I promise.

April 30, 2018 - Posted by intlxpatr | Adventure, Blogging, Circle of Life and Death, Family Issues, Health Issues, Road Trips, Seattle, Travel