Family, Weather & Home

It’s been a long time since our last post. And it’s been an exhilarating few weeks!

From Carlsbad Caverns, we headed across southern New Mexico to Arizona. We made it through Tucson shortly before its 71st day of measurable snowfall since 1894. From there, on February 2, we drove north to Sedona, AZ, one of the most beautiful cities we’ve seen on our trip. Red rocks are everywhere, and they uplift the soul.

There was a snowstorm brewing in northern Arizona, so our plan to go to the Grand Canyon didn’t work. Instead, we drove to San Diego to hang out with Dr. Gwen. As we arrived in San Diego, we thought we’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Seattle – yes, it rains in San Diego!

We had a wonderful week (the sun finally came out) visiting Gwen and her buds…

getting some beach time…

reconnecting with our dear friends from Snoqualmie, Doug and Janine Cherry…

and seeing our first Pacific Coast sunset in 11 months.

We then headed up to Thousand Oaks to visit our magical granddaughter, Mia – oh, yeah, and to see her parents (Pete and Angela)!

We had three weeks of being grandparents – painting Mia’s room, taking her to a park, chauffeuring her tired parents to a just-the-two-of-them Valentine’s dinner, laughing at MiaSpeak (Roxy and Sting are now Woky and Dinger), “helping” her play the purple guitar we bought her in Nashville, reading her books and just being with her!

Ginny also spent a day at Hermosa Beach with her niece, Christina Craw Donovan, and grandnephew Jack.

On the day we left Thousand Oaks, we saw our first rainbow in months!

Weather again dictated our route. Our destination was Oregon at a time it was getting clobbered by snowstorms (yes, plural!). So we got creative, which also allowed us to hit the 47th state of our journey – Nevada. Our most direct route would have been up California through the San Joaquin Valley, but that would have led us through major mountain passes over the Siskiyous and the Cascades. For us, “Chains Required” is synonymous with “NFW.” So we skirted the mountains by driving east to Las Vegas, then up through the Nevada high desert.

In the classic RV movie Lost In America, Albert Brooks’s wife blows their entire savings at a casino on the first night of their cross-country trip. Having no interest in a life-imitates-art moment, we avoided The Strip. A safer adventure was visiting Hoover Dam, a remarkable engineering feat. Fun fact: Lake Mead, formed behind Hoover Dam, is big enough to submerge the entire state of Connecticut under 10 feet of water.

Other than Vegas and Reno, Nevada is, shall we say, sparsely populated.

Five hours north of Vegas, we finally saw a gas station and stopped to top off our tank. It turns out that diesel fuel isn’t the only thing for sale at that little oasis. We wondered why there were so many big trucks in the parking lot of the building next to where we filled up, until we saw the sign.

Moving right along…we headed to Bend, Oregon, on the eastern side of the Cascades. Bend was experiencing its biggest snowfall in 100 years, but we timed our drive to be within a nice little window of clear weather. We charged through Nevada, the northeastern tip of California and up central Oregon – our hardest driving of the entire trip (820 miles in two days). We obsessively monitored weather forecasts. When we were only 30 minutes from Bend, it started snowing lightly, but the roads were clear so we kept driving. We got to our RV park just in time – we woke up the next morning to a fresh dump of snow.

Arriving in Bend means our journey is over. This is our new home.

Arriving here also meant reconnecting with our friends Ralph and Kim Klinke. No brewpub will be safe now.

Bend has always been on our list of possible landing spots, but it wasn’t until we arrived (on March 6) and started exploring the area that we concluded it’s the place for us. It’s beautiful, vibrant, cool, healthy, unpretentious and full of nice people. We found a great little house across the street from a riverfront park and walking distance to downtown, where – building inspection willing – we’ll move next month.

Our first two weeks in Bend have been a rush of activity – house-hunting, learning our way around a new place, remembering how to walk carefully on ice and snow. But overriding these practicalities has been a tide of emotions about the end of our grand adventure – wonderment at all we have seen and learned about our beautiful country; sadness that our trip of a lifetime is over; satisfaction that we made our dream come true; a sense that, as a couple, we’ve never felt closer or happier; and excitement about all that we still have to look forward to in life.

Ginny, with her gift for writing from the heart, will have more to say about all of this in a future post.