Well, we depart on our journey the day after tomorrow, Wednesday, May 18. I can't believe how many last minute things I have forgotten to take care of…like having someone pick up our mail, canceling the newspaper, who's going to mow our lawn and water our vegetable garden, and all the rest of what seems like an endless to do list.
Alas, we have decided not to take our little Yorkie, Ernie with us. Our preferred stopping places are B and B's and lodges and after looking through my copy of Milepost, the bible of all mainland US to Alaska travelers, we could find precious few places that were "pet friendly." And, leaving him in the car while we are having dinner or looking at some attraction would be very worrisome for us. So Ernie will be going to visit his cousin, Oliver, an adorable Pomeranian at Derek's brother's house. If you can believe it, Oliver weighs only about half as much as Ernie, who barely tips the scales at five pounds. To be sure, we'll miss our little tyke, but we can relax knowing that he's in good hands with Doug and Barbara.
We have a Garmin Model 1490T GPS thingy that can do anything. Regrettably, I know how to take advantage of only its most rudimentary features. So, today I downloaded the instruction manual…all 63 pages of it and decided to read it. By the time I got to page six, I had forgotten all of what was on pages one through five. I gave up. However, I was able to check it out and, indeed, it does include maps of Canada. Yea!! Hopefully, it won't leave us stranded somewhere in the far reaches of the Yukon. I'm sure it has a little hand that comes out of the side of the machine and turns itself off at the end of each day, if only I knew how to access it. I need to find some twelve-year-old to help me figure the stupid thing out.
Our pile of absolutely necessary things to take on our trip is too big. Way too big. It takes up half of our living room. We would need a moving van to haul it all. So, we are now in the process of culling out the unnecessary…separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak. I guess I don't really need to take that Boy Scout mess kit that I've hung onto for fifty years or those heavy cast iron frying pans. We need to travel as lightly as possible and still bring everything that we're going to need. Not as easy as it looks! I probably should have gotten rid of that Boy Scout cooking kit forty-nine years ago.
Hopefully, come Wednesday morning, our trusty GPS will get us from our home in Rock Hill onto I-80 in eastern Pennsylvania where we will stay for a very long time. In fact, our first stop of any significance will be Omaha, Nebraska where we will visit with Derek's graduate school office mate, Bill, who we have not seen in 35 years. Derek's brother, Doug, just recently attended the funeral of his college roommate whom he hadn't seen in many years. They just never seemed to manage to get together. Bill and I aren't going to wait that long. I'll let you know if we see anything of interest between home and Omaha. I've heard there are white squirrels in Onley, Illinois and my brother told me about the world's largest stuffed steer somewhere around there. I may have to convince Marcella that those are things we need to see. We're still not sure exactly where we will head in a northwesterly direction and cross the border into Canada.
We plan to post our mileage for each day's travel and, like Thoreau, keep an accounting of our daily expenditures…unless we start spending too much and we want to keep it a secret!
Derek (and Marcella)
In planning an LA to Ann Arbor trip several years ago I learned that Kansas has the world's largest ball of twine. Unfortunately, my travelling partner was not as willing to go out of the way to see it as I was. :)
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