Road Tripping

Some couples start fighting the moment they sit down in a car together. Donna and I are lucky; we get along better in a car than almost anywhere else, and we’ve always loved driving cross-country together. We’d been considering taking a trip for our 50th anniversary (which is coming up this December), and it just happened there was a big Hash House Harrier event scheduled for Labor Day weekend in Portland, Oregon, so we decided to go for it, working in visits with friends and family in Nevada, California, and Washington along the way. We hit the road on Friday, August 28, and pulled back into our driveway on Friday, September 11 — 3,840 miles in 13 days.

Our son and his family live in Las Vegas, so we drive back and forth between Tucson and Sin City a couple of times a year, and those four hundred miles on US 93 seem to fly by. After spending a night with the kids in Vegas, we hit the road north Saturday morning. Las Vegas to Reno on US 95, the second leg of our trip, was a rarer treat, and our homebound leg down the eastern side of Nevada on US 93, several days later, was all new to us. You may think there’s not much to see in Nevada, but you’d be wrong. The visuals in Nevada are subtle but striking, and coming across a little town or settlement after miles and miles of dry desert is a bit like coming upon Mos Eisley, that wretched hive of scum and villainy.

We spent Saturday night in Reno catching up with Air Force friends, Jim and Lenore; crossed Donner Pass into California and down to Pittsburg in the East Bay on Sunday to spend the afternoon and night visiting with Donna’s Aunt Georgie and Uncle Sal; then north to Folsom on Monday to visit our old friend and squadron mate Dick. The air conditioning in our new truck crapped out Sunday afternoon as we pulled into Pittsburg, but I was able to schedule a Monday morning appointment at the local GMC dealer, and we were on our way by 11 AM, so no harm, no foul — we didn’t have another car issue the rest of the trip.

Below: Jim & Lenore in Reno; Aunt Georgie & Uncle Sal in Pittsburg; Dick and his son Neal in Folsom. Click on the thumbnails to see the original photos on Flickr.

After breakfast in Folsom Tuesday morning we drove north to Oroville to spend the rest of Tuesday and all day Wednesday at Cousin Mike & Val’s house, where we visited with them and Donna’s Aunt Joyce (who drove over from nearby Chico). Cousin Denise and her husband Clarence came up from Sacramento and had dinner with us the first night. On Thursday we drove north to Portland, passing Mount Shasta — ominously bereft of snow — on the way.

I wrote about our three days in Portland with the Hash House Harriers on my other blog, posting several photos of old hashing friends we met there. While we were in Portland doing the hashing thing, I made a detour to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in nearby McMinnville, photos of which you can see here, and together we visited Cousin Rick and his wife Marta, who live in downtown Portland. Donna wanted to take a tour of the Pendleton Mills, but our portable car GPS navigator told us Pendleton was three hours away, so we stayed in Portland.

Portland has to be one of the coolest cities ever, but damn there are a lot of drunken vomiting pissing shitting derelicts on the streets, many of them young white people, some of them couples. It was a shock, and I’m still figuring out how to react to it. One thing’s for sure, I didn’t like it.

Below: Cousin Mike & Aunt Joyce making gnocchi with Donna; Cousin Denise, Clarence, & Val on the patio in Oroville; Cousin Rick & Marta in Portland. You know what to do.

We left Portland Sunday morning for Bremerton, Washington, where we spent a few days with our Niece Rebecca and her husband Nate. Nate is a retired Navy submariner who is now a civilian nuclear engineer at the naval shipyard, and Rebecca is starting a career as a social worker. We’d originally planned to spend just Sunday and Monday night in the Seattle area, but we added a day to our stay so I could reconnect with my oldest friend Jeremy, a junior high school buddy from the days I lived in Laramie, Wyoming (1959 to 1961), whom I’d last seen on a summer trip to Colorado after graduating from high school in 1964. Jeremy grew up and went to Vietnam with the Seabees, came back in one piece and went to college, and made a career as a librarian in Seattle. Today he’s a rare & hard-to-find book dealer, married to Phyllis, whom I had never met. Donna’s heard me talk about Jeremy all our married lives together, so she wanted to meet him too, and of course we both wanted to meet the mysterious Phyllis.

The four of us met Monday at The Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle (there’s a photoblog of our visit to the museum here). I’m not sure historic aircraft is either Jeremy or Phyllis’ thing, but we had a great visit, crawling all over the museum and talking for hours. Jeremy and I hit it off again, something that doesn’t always happen between childhood friends who meet again more than 50 years later, and for that I’m truly thankful. And we adored Phyllis. It was an awesome reunion!

I should mention that I’d made efforts to locate Jeremy over the years, all to no avail. Then, about a year ago, he found me. If you guessed he used Facebook to do it, you win! My mistake was in looking for a man named Jerry … he started going by Jeremy, his actual name, many years ago.

We really enjoyed the cool Washington evenings with Rebecca and Nate, a great young couple we admire and like being around. We sat on the porch of their home in Bremerton and talked the nights away, along with another young couple we’ve met before, their friends John and Stephanie.

Below: Jeremy & Phyllis at the air museum; on the porch with John & Steffi at Rebecca & Nate’s.

We started home Wednesday with a ten-plus hour drive to Boise, Idaho; then a twelve-hour drive through Nevada Thursday (and a second night with the kids in Vegas); then the short & familiar eight-hour hump home to Tucson on Friday. We never saw Mount Rainier when we were in the Seattle area, but we got glimpses of it, and also Mount St. Helens, on the drive to Boise. Cutting through northeastern Oregon we found ourselves on the outskirts of Pendleton, so I drove into town and Donna was able to cross Pendleton Mills off her list after all. I asked Donna if I got a gold star for taking her there and she said yes. Then I asked if I could cash it in on a new motorcycle, and she said no — I am married to a cold, heartless woman. Yes, we ran the I-10 shooter gantlet driving through Phoenix, but apart from a chip in the windshield picked up the day before outside Ely, Nevada, we arrived home unscathed.

I wish I could say the trip was 100% delightful, but a bit of trouble came along for the ride. Sometime after we left Tucson, Polly’s ex-boyfriend dumped off Polly’s two cats at our house. The deal we had with Polly was no cats, and there they were in our house after all. Friday morning, while we were in Portland, one of them clawed Schatzi’s eye, lacarating her inner eyelid. Polly tried to handle things herself and pretty much failed. No, totally failed. She finally called us Friday night, after all the regular veterinarians were closed for the weekend. We were able to find a reliable Tucson friend to help out and get Schatzi to an emergency vet clinic that night, the same clinic that worked on Schatzi’s back a few months ago. The dog had surgery that night, spent Saturday recovering at the clinic, and came home Sunday.

We were furious, of course, and it pretty much ruined our Hash House Harrier weekend in Portland. I laid down a cats-out-of-the-house edict and was prepared to back it up with action — specifically, driving the cats out into the desert and setting them free to survive or die on their own — and a day after we got home Polly found a friend with a barn to take them in. In the meantime, though, we have a $2,000 vet bill. Next time we take a road trip, Polly will not be left in charge. Here’s Schatzi in her cone:

I expect in time we’ll look back on the Schatzi incident and laugh, but it’ll be a while yet. Polly is still with us, still looking for work, but the cats are gone and the dogs are happy we’re home again. We saw a lot of old friends and made promises to see them again, and I’m reunited with my oldest friend ever. We didn’t get to hash in Portland but we saw many of our hashing friends there, and all in all we had a memorable and happy 50th anniversary road trip. Now to plan the actual 50th anniversary party in December!