Olympia, Here I Came

The plan was to ride my motorcycle up to visit my youngest daughter and her husband, but I chickened out. It took more than the threat of snow, although that was a particularly potent threat in and of itself, it was really the cold temperature that could come along with snow. Since my son has now given me heated gloves and a heated jacket liner, I could have made the ride with most of my body relatively warm. No, the threat of snow, and the cold that snow generally comes with, was really a threat of ice.

As it turned out, the roads were generally dry and what flurries did happen were brief and of no consequence. But, I still was glad that I was in the heatable cab of a Ford Ranger XLT, even with its 1/3 the mpg of my motorcycle. My daughter was also glad because it let me bring substantially more stuff than just myself. There was a lot of snow, visible on the tops of the Coastal Range all the way up California's I-5, after I-505 joined it. (Well, I don't really know how far from the coast the range that I was looking at was but it was to the west of I-5.)

Even though I was not on my motorcycle and took every advantage of that that I could, I also had some of the benefits that my previous motorcycle riding had given me. Since the trucks ventilation didn't have an option for recirculate, I had all the benefits of the outside air, including the odors. Since I traveled the entire distance with my lights on, people felt justified in cutting me off because I was obviously in a highly maneuverable vehicle with tremendous motivation to avoid colliding.

About half way up, I took advantage of a half-way stop. (It would have been truly half way had it not taken the better part of two hours to get from Salem past Portland.)

Here I'm going to take a break from my normal attempts to express myself humorously. Some of that attempt is an effort to recast my life to be a little lighter than it has been for the last three plus years. Some of it is to avoid depressing any readers, and myself further, with any sadness or tale of woe. In this case though, and continuing in my now tradition of not naming names, my youngest daughter's father-in-law passed away after a nine-month battle with an aggressive lung cancer, this after her mother's demise, two years ago, to gynecological cancer after a two-and-a-half year battle.

Now, her mother-in-law and I are in a very similar place and we had much to talk about and share tears over. Anyone who has lost a spouse of decades carries around a hole where that spouse used to be. It is both our fervent hope that, while we do not ever expect that hole to go away, we will learn to focus on other areas of our lives to help us learn to better live with the hole. While we don't want to be intrusive, our children, indeed all of our families, are important foci. If it can be any consolation at all, I do find that while I can accidentally trip over the hole from the most innocuous of triggers, I am doing so less often and the memories that I treasure, while still tinged with bittersweet, are becoming more treasures than triggers.

In addition to our open conversational help for each other this way, our talk ranged through many other subjects. It was truly great to have an adult conversation where I didn't avoid subjects entirely or self-censor.

I woke up early, which is to say my now normal time. As the darkness was replaced with light, there was a misting of snow, which led to a twoem: I chickened out and didn't ride. I'm watching it snow from inside. Glad I have a truck.

Then during and after breakfast we continued our conversation, now talking more about our children, from whom we fielded several phone calls from the ones I'm visiting now. One of them was a request for several more items to be added to my long distance hauling service. While we spent some time rounding them up, they did not delay my departure beyond its planned time. Our conversation delayed it long enough that I saw this tom turkey from her window.

Of course, the delay and the accident that I never saw slowed my travel enough to Portland to allow me to catch Portland's rush hour. (The "rush hour" label must have been invented by some spin doctor trying to attract people to some city by falsely labeling stop and creep as rush. Further, this person had no concept of time.)

The rest of the trip was uneventful and allowed me to catch up on a number of phone calls, including a call to wish my sister a happy birthday. Yes, she was born on April 1st. Some years I call her and say April Fool. Other years I don't call her. I don't know what she is fooled by more. (I'm not sure that being able to use a phone when traveling is really a plus. I really like the peace and noise from riding a motorcycle.)