A visit in Bellingham, WA

Our truck deliveries brought us to Bellingham on Sunday. We spent the afternoon with my cousin Elizabeth and her daughter Molly--and we visited our former cat, Wylie, who now happily resides with Elizabeth. Here we all are. Wylie is the grey mop that Elizabeth is holding. Molly is holding Maxx.

Another tight parking job

Just another day at the beach for Kurt, but I was amazed at how easily he backed our 53' trailer into this extremely narrow space.

Only inches on each side and he did not touch either of the neighboring trailers as he backed in. (I know this for a fact-even though I had my eyes closed for most of the manuever)

Spring in California--OR maybe not!

We are back in California this week-

We had a lovely drive over the Grapevine on I-5 on Wednesday morning- blue skies and about 65 degrees

- and 50 miles of fruit trees are blooming in the San Joaquin valley

BUT look what a difference two days makes.

Here we are parked at the truck stop at the top of the Grapvine on Friday morning. This time the weather is more like 32 degrees and the strong wind blowing SNOW sideways around us.

Visitors

On our last trip past Longview WA we were visited by our friends Bobbie and Mike

Time to get the truck washed

Here we are driving in to the wash bay as another truck is leaving out the other side. We will get the tractor, the trailer and the engine washed- for a total of $70. Notice the road film on the sides of the tractor

Once inside the bay 6 to 8 guys go to work spraying and scrubbing our truck. It took 15 minutes to wash all 65 feet of our vehicle.

Back out into the sunshine and look how shiny we are!
[We washed the truck on Saturday in California- by Monday morning we were in the rain in Seattle-- end of shiny truck :( ]

Oranges look even sadder!- But they are going to Market

Here is a picture from this week of an orange grove in California. The trees look awful-makes us wonder if they will lose the trees too.

But just after seeing these trees we saw a number of trucks hauling oranges- so they must have had some fruit worth saving after the January freezes

Freeway bird- UPGRADE

Version 1.o
For the last three trips through the Sacramento River delta in California we have seen solitary white birds just standing alongside the freeway. Sometimes they are in the median between the lanes- unfazed by the noise and motion of passing vehicles. I finally got a good picture of one. I think they are Egrets


Version 2.0
On yet another trip through the delta we got this close up

A quick visit to Sequim

We got back to Sequim over the weekend. We met up with my sister, Su, and had a nice visit with our brother Jay--even getting him to smile for the camera.

Later we took a nice hike on the Olympic Discovery Trail near Sequim with Su, Jeff and Tucker.

Then later that day we got this great shot of Mt Rainier catching the last rays of the sun at sunset

Back to the Evergreen Northwest

Here is our route for our first trip in February. Tacoma to Salt Lake City, over to Stockton and then north again to Tacoma. No bad weather- YAY- but it is still winter everywhere east of the pacific coast mountains. It was great to get back to the Pacific northwest and see green again.


Here is a picture from my favorite Rest Area in Oregon. It is a thrill for me to be back under the evergreens after a week of driving in the more arid places in the american west. In my experience there doesn't seem to be any place out side of the Pacific Northwest (and the redwoods of CA) that grows towering trees like these.

Another Idaho-ism

Also along the Idaho highways - at least every 5 minutes we passed a truck like this. At first we thought they carried Idaho's famous potatoes but the tubers were more football sized. We think they are carrying sugar beets--- Hmm, a truck every 5 minutes all day long, 7 days a week-- that's a LOT of sugar!

Along the "Oregon Trail"

Today we stopped at a historical site along Interstate 84 in southern Idaho. The highway follows the route of the historic Oregon Trail and they have preserved a portion of the actual trail ruts from the emigrant wagons. Fascinating!

More family visits

On our way north from California we had time to spend with Kurt's baby sister, Mary Jo in Eugene. Here they are together. The insets are our two beautiful red-headed nieces- Taylor and Claire.

A surprise for Lisa's birthday

Joanie made a surprise visit to Denver for Lisa's birthday (Her 30th- wow!). Amy and Tim also were in on the surprise and we all arrived at Lisa's school in the middle of her class day. She was quite overwhelmed by her "sneaky" family- but she managed to carry on with her kindergartners. Here she is being the wonderful teacher that she is!

More storm damage

We saw more winter storm damage when we got to California. The usually robust and dark evergreen orange trees were, instead, a sickly paler green and very droopy.