Getting Ready and Getting Started

August 22

We are wrapping up things in Portland. It has been a great summer but I couldn’t tell you how we spent it…it just seemed to move along until it was gone! We somehow thought we would have lots of free time, enough time that we might take a drive up the NW coast in search of a Native American mask to add tour collection. That didn’t happen.

The past couple of weeks we have been doing things like taking items from the house we are living in for the summer to our storage unit. We gave our Tahoe to Mark, our older son so borrowed it when he was in town to take the larger items to the unit.

Today marks two weeks before we head out to the east coast and the beginning of our odyssey. We are spending the weekend volunteering for a fund raising event for Our House of Portland. A friend asked us to help her with the cooking so today we were in her kitchen from 8:40 until 4:40. Sophie is a fabulous cook of Indian cuisine, one of our favorites. The dinner for 20 is tomorrow night so we will return tomorrow to help with what needs to be done.

Next week we plan to put more things into storage. We did a practice pack this week to make sure we could pack for seven months of travel in four suitcases. We made it in three. Our goal is to have only the minimum here to pack and take to the unit our last week. We leave Sept 6^th so on the 5^th we will take our bed and bed/bath linens to the unit and any clothes we will not be taking with us. Our Vietnam visas arrived this week, we have suspended our magazine subscriptions and the NY Times, all effective Sept 5^th.  There are so many details to tend to when leaving for an extended period of time. We make lists, mark things on the calendar and think we have thought of everything only to realize we have overlooked something. This week we realized we should get our flu shots before leaving. An ad at a chain pharmacy brought this to our attention.

August 30, 2014

We are now a week away from leaving. We took another load of boxes to the storage unit this week and started more packing today. We will pack all the clothes we aren’t taking with us, all the kitchen items, etc early in the week. We won’t cook after Wednesday. We are making menus from what is left in the freezer and pantry. We took 26# of canned goods and some bed linens to a food bank and household goods place this week. Our load is really getting light!

I have been going through our itinerary and copying notes I made while researching plane, train and bus schedules. So now everything is on an Excel spreadsheet instead of scraps of paper. It is beginning to feel very real and I am excited. We got our flu shots yesterday so we crossed that off the list.

Sept 5

This is our last day in the house we have rented for the summer.  Ron downloaded videos then we made our first run to the storage unit took longer than expected due to a couple of hiccups. We had a plastic cover for the mattress and it turned out it was for the split box springs that we stored in May. The cover we needed for the mattress was on the box springs and we couldn’t get to them. So crafty Ron split the two smaller covers and taped them to each other to make a big cover. It worked but took too much time. Then it took a long time to get the mattress into the space pushing, lifting and grunting seemed to do the trick. We raced off from Sellwood to the unit with the second load and threw it into the unit and dashed to Vancouver in time for Ron’s haircut. We had a late lunch of fish tacos at Woody’s which are the best! Then we went to Max and Donna’s who will take care of our car while we are gone. They drove us to Howard Johnson’s near the airport where we spent the night. We walked about 15 blocks to a great little Colombian/Venezuela place for dinner. We found Mama Leo’s through Trip Advisor and it was fabulous.

We got up at 3:45 to get to the airport by 4:45. Not enough sleep by any stretch of imagination. We arrived in Greenville, SC about 7:00 where we will stay with my sister in the mountains near the NC border. On Sunday, the next day, my sister had all my nieces and nephews and their families up here for lunch. In addition friends of ours from Atlanta drove up to join in the fun. My family all talks at once, loudly. It was a great day.

On Monday we drove up to Flat Rock NC where James and Doug were staying and spent a few hours walking through Hendersonville NC, pursuing shops. We had a great pulled pork platter at a local restaurant before heading home. We thoroughly enjoyed getting in another visit with them before they headed back to Atlanta.

Sept 9

Today I drove to Greer SC to visit a cousin of mine. It was under an hour’s drive. I took a route through some back roads. I came across one of the biggest crosses I have ever seen. I am in the heart of the Bible belt here. At the foot of the cross were the words “Behold the Lamb”. In the NW where we live there is a Starbucks or other espresso shop every two blocks. Here there is a Baptist church every two blocks. On the way home on the same road I saw a sign that read “Fried Oreos”. Welcome to my world in South Carolina.

Sept 12

We ended our stay in SC with a visit with my cousin Ben Geer and dinner at a fish farm. We dined on fried catfish and hush puppies. It just seemed a fitting way to end this part of our trip. Tomorrow we will get up early and Toni and Charlie (my sister and her husband) will drive us to Charlotte NC about two hours away where Ron has his annual ICMA meeting.