(One) Liner Notes May 29-31

-  South Dakota is truly beautiful.
-  The Missouri River really is wide.
-  South Dakota on the west side of the Missouri looks completely different from how it looks on the east side.
-  The Badlands is an incredible sight, and I'd like to return.
-  Some of the Badlands topography looks like conglomerate rock and some looks like elephant skin.
-  The texture of the formations in the Badlands is like wet, sticky clay.
-  Wall Drug is really like a mall with many stores and a Western theme.
-  The good thing about the rain on May 29th was that is wasn't snow!

-  The Corn Palace is a large building covered in murals made out of corn and other grains, and the murals are changed yearly.
-  Mt. Rushmore was awesome!
-  The Master Weatherman was sooo good to us on Monday, parting the clouds to reveal glorious sunshine and crystal blue skies while we were at Mt. Rushmore.

-  Devil's Tower was interesting.
-  Sheridan, WY is an impressively clean, neat town.
-  Deep fried dill pickles with either ranch dressing or peanut butter are available in Sheridan WY.
-   When driving across the plains you cannot tell how fast you're going until you glance down and see the odometer needle much farther to the right than it's been since the last time you were in WY-----fun!
-  Because WY is so uber large, it still takes a very long time to get from point A to point B even though you're hurtling down the road at 90 MPH!
-  The Sheridan, WY phone book covers approximately 8,000 sq. mi.------I'm dead serious.
-  We saw a horizon 60 mi. away and our road 9 miles away at one point.
-  It's still fun watching for antelope.
-  The Western sky is incomparable with amazing clouds that change constantly.
-  The wind still blows incessantly so that wind chill should be part of the weather forecast all year long.
-  William Fredrick Cody, aka Buffalo Bill, was not only busy hunting buffalo and putting on shows but also visiting many bars in many towns that have later boasted about his visits.

-  Montana should be called, " The Mountain State" instead of "Big Sky".
-  Temperatures across southern MT this morning were in the 30's and this afternoon in the 50's-low 60's.
-  Montana is also HUGE with very high mountains everywhere.
.  The mountains are still very snow covered, looking like someone dusted them with a heavy coating of powdered sugar.
-  Nels saw a coyote and I saw a sand hill crane today. (Tues.)

-  We have now driven almost 2,500 miles.
-  We have enjoyed every minute of it---honest.

-  We have now driven half of the amount we have to drive.
-  Tomorrow, Wed., we drive to Seattle where driving on the interstate system way too fast ends!
-  Above pictures top to bottom: 1) Badlands, 2-4) Three Rushmore pictures with the weather improving, 5) along the road in Montana, 6) the Corn palace.

-  Finally, a Maserati doesn't really look any different from other sports cars, and sometimes it's a fat, old man in shorts driving instead of Fabio.

Dreaming

No more looking out windows (see blog titled "Dog at the Window").  No more waiting.  Whatever isn't packed gets left behind.  We are on our way!  After more than five years of planning and dreaming, saving and preparing, we are leaving for Alaska in a few days.

There was a time when dreaming wasn't part of what we did.  We were busy with careers and raising four kids.  Life was good but intense.  We kept our heads down and our motors running.  Even vacations were few and far between.  Oh, we got to travel quite a bit, but most of that was in conjunction with Nelson's work so that I got to see the sights while he got to give seminars and attend meetings.

I'm not complaining.  We have had a great life together.  Dreaming was not a highly developed skill in either of us though until the kids began leaving home, salaries became more than barely adequate, and the edges on the daily "gind" smoothed out somewhat.  Slowly we lifted our heads and began to see a fun and interesting world out there beyond kids and work.

I honestly can't remember when this particular dream took on a life of its own.  It was a birthday; so new binoculars were purchased.  It was Christmas; so we bought fishing equipment and a NOAA weather radio.  Our car had an argument with a deer and lost; so we replaced it with an all-wheel drive SUV.  Slowly and steadily our dream took shape, and we collected what we needed for our adventure.

That adventure is here now.  We're like kids on Christmas Eve.  There's much to be done in these last few days in Pennsylvania, but we're up for it.  Dreaming is a good thing.  Realizing a dream is even better!

Odyssey

Odyssey-------"a long series of wanderings or adventures, especially when filled with notable experiences, hardships, etc."  Little did I know how prophetic the title of my blog would be.  Nelson submitted it when I asked for suggestions.  I loved the double-entendre.

Homer, the Greek poet, wrote  The Odyssey  almost three thousand years ago.  It is an epic poem--12,110 lines-- about Odysseus's trip home after the Trojan War.  The man had problems!  It took him ten years to get home.

While our story may not be all the way to "epic", it certainly is on that road, quickly passing many mileposts.  But hey, smooth and easy was never promised!

 The collective life of our family took a sharp turn toward the scary when one of our members landed in surgery for a quadruple by-pass and valve repair.  This scenario is common to many families, I'm sure, but not when the patient is only 38 years old!  Fantasizing our family's story, I had never pictured one of my daughters being widowed during my lifetime!  Fortunately, the procedures were successful and recovery has begun.

Before all this happened, as you may recall, we were having trouble finding a place to live in Homer.  We thought we had two different houses only to loose them both and so had to postpone our departure by two weeks.  We didn't know it then but now realize  we needed to be here.  How unfortunate and frustrating it would have been to be on the road somewhere in the wilds of British Columbia when all this drama was taking place in PA!

Now, at last, we're able to breathe.  The crisis is abating; my daughter is demonstrating grace and maturity under very difficult circumstances; her husband is recovering; we're able to make final preparations to start our trip.

 Oh, and one more completely fantastic and amazing thing.  We have a house to go to----one that is better than any other house we considered, one where there's plenty of room for guests and when you look out the window or sit on the deck, you're looking at water, mountains and glaciers!  Or you could be looking at a moose!  It's fully furnished and yet cheaper than others we didn't get.  How awesome is that?

Dog At The Window

Right now Tuhlula, our black and white lab/boxer dog, is sitting directly in front of me staring out the window.  It's a beautiful day out there, a day she would mormally be outside sunning herself, her naps punctuated with frenzied Ups truck chasing.

Tuhlula has a real love-hate affair with box trucks.  She barks and carries on frantically inside or out when one comes by.  But I think she secretly loves them because they give her an excuse to run an impromptu race through our yard at breakneck speed.  She usually wins.  The various drivers know her and comment about her racing prowess when they happen to stop at my house.  They often leave a milk bone with my packages!

But today she has to stay inside.  She doesn't like that.  Nelson is spraying the yard with weed killer.  It would be very bad for her to be around that.  And furthermore, she'll have to endure for about three days!  She doesn't know that yet.  So she sits, staring.  Every once in awhile she will moan and sigh.  But she never gets mean with us, her masters.  She never growls, bares her teeth, gets moody, chews up shoes or furniture.  She always has a wag, a kiss, excitement for us when we pay attention to her.  In this way she has more sense, trust and "maturity" than most humans.

Nelson and I are currently staring out a "window" too.  Noses pressed, sighing sighs, wondering.  I have lost track of what "plan" we're on.  It must be double T  by now!  I'm grateful plan A didn't work.  There are a host of reasons why it wasn't the best.  We know that now.  And because in hindsight we understand that, we can trust that plan double S wasn't the best either, along with all the plans that went before.

As for plan double U?  I don't even know what that is!  I'm fresh out of plans.  That's probably a good thing.  So we'll just take it "one day at a time".  What an easy thing to say but hard thing to do!  We'll keep trying though.  God, help me to at least have the sense, trust and maturity Tuhlula does!  I don't want to sacrifice "the best" on the altar of "the good".  I need to just keep looking out the window-----expecting, trusting, grateful that I'm not in charge!

Flexibility

Okay, I have to be honest.  For more than two weeks, even as I was getting this blog going, there was a major upheaval in our plans.  Just days before signing a lease, we learned that the owner of the house we wanted/had in Homer changed his mind about the deal.  The house is for sale, but he had told us he would take it off the market for a year.  Suddenly, he changed his mind and was no longer willing to do that.

So how did we feel about driving 6,000 miles to live in a house where we had no idea how long we could stay and while we were there we would have to "show" to potential buyers?   Forget it!!

With that turn of events, we were homeless in Homer.  Now you have to understand, this is not a city, not even a large town.  There are 4500 people there year round and not much in the way of rentals, especially furnished. Well, there are the $300 per night places for short-term vacationers.  Not our scene.    We quickly decided along the way that we had to be willing to rent an unfurnished place and then buy what we needed up there.  That's cool, I thought.  Shopping and I are close friends. 

With many emails and phone calls we finally found another place.  It sounded good and the owner was positive.  It wasn't available until June 15 so we postponed our trip.    For two weeks we were almost certain that we would have this new place.

NOT!

As of today, we are back to square one.  It's easy to be discouraged, easy to feel angry.  Today I've been flitting between  both.  And then I remember that this is testing, testing.  Tests are not fun, but they are necessary.   If a task is "easy", it's not as much fun, and where is the victory?

Of course, I'm preaching to myself, here.

It's still about four hours too early to get on the phone and try, try again.  Making these types of phone calls has always been hard for me.  I would rather have a root canal. This is why secretarial work was never one of my career considerations.  I'm usually relieved when no one answers.  Unfortunately, Nelson feels the same way; so guess who gets to do the calling?   But, hey, do I want to live in AK or not?


So..........one ringy dingy; two ringy dingies.........

Flexibility, a very useful quality!