Day ONE!

By Jim.

When we dreamed up this adventure, we didn’t expect to spend the first night of it in Cle Elum, WA, but here we are.

It’s been an amazing 24 hours.

Our dear friends, Steve and Kathy McDonald, hosted a going-away party for us last night.  Over 40 people showed up.  The three primary things that flowed during the evening were laughs, tears and wine (well, the order of #2 and #3 is debatable). In four short years, we’ve been lucky to make sooo many good friends.  To those of you reading this who were at the party, THANK YOU for giving us an indelible memory!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This morning started for me bidding a fond farewell to my BMW 650, my all-time favorite car – my mid-life crisis car without the crisis.  Then came the REALLY hard good-bye – the house closed mid-day.  Doing the walk-through with the buyers was one of those this-is-really-happeing moments.  It’s been a great house for many reasons – hard metrics like the views and the floorpan, plus cool metrics like the neighbors and those holidays when it was jammed with our kids, but the most special thing about it was that it was Ginny’s and my first house TOGETHER.

Then we hit the road.

We planned well – we knew we wouldn’t get going until mid-afternoon, so decided to go only as far as the other side of Snoqualmie Pass, which is how Cle Elum ended up being our first destination. Tomorrow, we’re off to Pullman to visit Greg.  Now the bottle of champagne is gone, I’ve been conferred the privilege of giving the dogs their last-call walk in the rain, and we have a lot of good things to savor.