Dinner with the Naspos

On Monday night we were very fortunate to meet up with Joanie's cousin Diana and her husband Ron just two days before they head out for a trip to China. They very kindly picked us up at a NJ Turnpike Service Plaza and brought us back to their home for a nice visit and a delicious dinner. It was great to catch up and to hear about their upcoming trip. We hope they got all their pretrip tasks completed on Tuesday! Thanks for seeing us on such short notice!

Cutting through the Delaware Water Gap

We traveled through the Delaware Water Gap between Pennsylvania and New Jersey on Monday morning. This is the place where the Delaware river has cut through a set of mountains and now Interstate-80 follows the river through too. You really do get a sense of there being a gap as you travel through. The first picture is approaching the gap from the west.


The river and the road run side-by-side at the tightest part of the gap. This is the muddiest that we have ever seen the Delaware- must be from the horrendous thunderstorms they had upstream last week (8" in 3 hours in one storm we read about).


The road takes a bend right after the gap and heads to New York City- which is about 70 miles from here

Headed East again

We loaded 42,500 pounds of Washington potatoes at this warehouse in Mattawa, WA. There's our red truck backed up to the loading dock. The sign on the building says "tatoes-really good potatoes!" This load is almost heavier than legal for our truck- we can only fill the fuel tanks half full and we are mighty slow going up hills. For my part- I have discovered that the truck does handle differently when it is so heavy- for instance it makes it REALLY important not to miss a gear! We are headed to New Jersey.

This trip marks the first anniversary of Matters On The Road- and it has been a beautiful trip- with lovely weather all the way so far. Montana and North Dakota have been particularly spectacular. Wide open skies and rolling green hills as far as the eye can see, here are a couple pics.


(this lower picture was impaired by BUGS on the windshield--the down side of the summer season!)

We loaded in WA in Thursday and will deliver all the potatoes to NJ on Tuesday morning. Stay tuned for our next installment.

12 days at HOME

We had the luxury of 12 days to spend in Kettle Falls. As always, there was more to do than we had time for but it was still wonderful. The weather cooperated with warm days and cool nights and we got a lot done.

The bathroom/stairwell remodel is moving along. We lowered the ceiling to create a loft area and Kurt completed the rewiring. Next trip home will finish the plumbing and then the fun part starts (tile and wall treatments). Here is Kurt hard at work...

We had visits from several family members including the other "Matter girls" - our three nieces, Molly, Becky and Jenny- seen here walking down to the orchard with Kurt.

AND, for Father's Day we drove our 47 Chevy to Couer d'Alene Idaho for their Car Cruise. It was great fun to be in parade of about 1500 old cars. Here we are

A surprise visit

There was a baby shower for Amy on June 2nd. The biggest surprise was having Lisa fly in from Denver for the shower. Here are the three of us the next day getting ready to go out to lunch during the real estate open house.

It's been a busy month

OK, a whole month has gone by, it's Tuesday again and Kurt is BACK in California- but we have visited a few points inbetween in the last month.

After the last time we were in CA we got home to Kettle Falls for more than a week. The bathroom remodel moved along while we were there. Here is one of the new pocket doors just installed.

Here is our departing view of our home as we left on May 23rd to go back to work

And here are the lupines blooming on our property


On Thursday 5/24 we loaded evergreen plants at a huge nursery near Portland Oregon. Here is the back of our truck- loaded to the hilt.

Here is just one of the fields of plants at this nursery. There were plants as far as you can see in four directions. Turns out that they sell to Home Depots across the country. Our load was 7 deliveries going to 7 Home Depots in NY, Connecticut and Rhode Island.


After an uneventful run across the country we stopped and took a day off to visit Amy and Tim in PA. We got there just in time to see them off to Denver on a house hunting trip. Kurt stayed on for a day to work on his Daddy-do List. Joanie stayed on for the whole week to help stage their PA house for a real estate open house on June 3 as well as attend the baby shower on June 2nd. See Amy's blog [link is in the sidebar above on the right] for some pictures of the shower and the house.

In the mean time, Kurt made his 7 deliveries of evergreens, reloaded yogurt, and drove back to California! He was without a working air conditioner on this trip- beyond miserable in the Nevada desert! He will be back in Tacoma by the weekend- and Joanie will be flying to meet him on Saturday. See, it HAS been a busy month.