Seattle Trip – Day 1 – Heading towards Boise

I am sorry to post two grumpy posts in a row, but our first day of vacation wasn’t any easier than the last few days leading up to it! The first travel day is never a relaxing day.

We were slow to leave because it turned out John had more remodel prep work he wanted to do. I had thought that we just had one last box to pack of last minute items we were still using. But he didn’t want construction dust and general wear and tear on our furniture and possessions, so he was hurriedly wrapping many items in plastic. You can buy big rolls of plastic in the moving sections of Home Depot and Lowes specifically for that purpose, it’s sort of like mega-sized saran wrap. I understand his logic, but the plastic wrapping is not something I’d choose to do if I were in charge, and something about it bugs me irrationally, lol.

Yeah, the houseplants are in Tucson. No, they can’t survive an entire month without water. I’m hoping our remodel contractor, Neil, can water them once or twice while we’re gone.

My poor house, all packed up!

Finally we were ready to leave. We hadn’t even managed to get out of Tucson before we came upon a traffic accident. Never a good omen.

Plus, did you see those gray skies? Yep, by the time we had reached Phoenix, the weather had turned awful. In the summer the desert can get some fairly extreme weather – high winds and brief, torrential rainfall. It will dump buckets in a very short time, reducing visibility to near zero and flooding the roads. The water can’t run off as fast as it’s coming down.

We got lucky and found a sunny park for a quick lunch of bread and cheese. At least Biska was doing fine. She is a great traveler!

As we continued on through Las Vegas, our phones were showing a 2-hour delay on the freeway between Las Vegas and St. George, UT. It was actually two different back-to-back delays, one of about half hour and followed by another of about an hour and a half.

It was already late in the afternoon and at that point, my vote would have been to get a hotel and try again the next morning. But John is an optimistic person and he also tends to want to stick to the plan. I like plans too, but I’m more of a Plan B and C sort of person. I was tired.

But he had a couple of good points. First, it wasn’t going to hurt us any to sit in traffic. We have everything we need accessible in the van. Secondly, phone data isn’t always reliable, so maybe it had cleared. It appeared to be clearing, we thought, hopefully.

So we crept along in stop and go traffic for two hours. The first slow up turned out to be a fairly severe accident. Someone in a small car had rear-ended a semi-truck. Looking at the damage of the car, it was hard for me to imagine that the person could have survived. I found it upsetting and did not take a picture of that one. Next we came to the road construction that had caused the slow-up and the accident. 

By the time we got through all that, it was early evening. Again my vote was to stay in a hotel in St. George. But we had reservations at a campground just an hour up the road, and John wanted to press on. He didn’t want to have to mess around with finding a hotel, unloading our van, etc. We were so close – we just had one more hour to drive!

The road through the canyon into the mountains north out of St. George is surprisingly twisty. The van was being blown around by very strong winds, and pummeled by thundershowers. Soon it was dark. The combination of dark and twisty and windy and downpours at 80 miles an hour was terrible! I tried to lose myself in my kindle book, but that wasn’t helping.

For some reason I had accidentally downloaded one of those psychological thriller books, complete with a psychopath killer and unreliable narrators. It wasn’t the kind of book I needed right then. But our cell reception (and my patience level) wasn’t good enough for me to want to try to find something else.

We had reservations at a private campground with limited check-in hours. It started to look like we weren’t going to make check-in. The instructions said to call if we were going to be past 9:00 pm, so I called. The guy was grumpy about the weather and seemed to suggest that we shouldn’t even bother to come. He called his own campground “a big mud pit”. Well, that wasn’t encouraging.

Plus, they closed at 10:00 pm. Would we even make it by 10? Turns out just barely – we arrived at 9:40! That’s cutting it tight. It was pitch dark and silent. Luckily we drive a small van and not a big rig. But our back-up camera doesn’t work in the dark, particularly with bikes on the bike rack on the back of the van. I had to get out and direct John as he backed up based solely on my feedback, completely blind in the night.

After we got situated for the night, John generously took the dog for a walk, but I didn’t even leave the van after we got it parked. It was past bedtime and it had been a hard day.

As we drifted off to sleep we were suddenly jolted awake by the long and agonizing cry of a squirrel or other small mammal in fear for its life. Then something small clunked against the van. I don’t know if the clunk was the fleeing animal or a somewhat larger animal that must have been chasing it. I don’t know the outcome of that drama, but it did not set a relaxing tone for my dreams.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.