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September Travels
October 22, 2018
October is nearly over, so it’s about time I get to recapping my September travels, which were a followup to the August ones I wrote about at the beginning of this month. After the family trip in August, when we and Mr. K’s sisters took their mom, Joan, out to Washington state, Joan found a retirement community she liked there and put down a deposit on an apartment, which she was able to move into shortly thereafter. The facility had furniture she could use until her own arrived … how it arrived was Mr. K and I went to Illinois and got it. (At least some of it; her whole condo in Illinois won’t fit into her apartment in Washington, for one, and for two, there’s only so much stuff we could bring back given the constraints we were working under.)
We left our mountain on September 11; there were hints of fall color starting to show, but the trees were still green and leafed out.
On our way east, of course we made a stop for pie; alas, it was disappointing. Because we are not all work and no play kind of people, we made a very brief stop at Joan’s in Illinois on the 13th to drop off some empty boxes and other packing supplies and pick up a vehicle before continuing on to spend the weekend with friends (mostly separately, thus the extra vehicle) in Michigan. We got some pie there, too, and that was not disappointing, though there was no fruit pie on offer which seemed odd for a pie shop but there were very tasty cookies to distract me from the lack of fruit.
Back in Illinois, we spent the next week or so packing up things Joan had requested we bring back. I focused on clothes and jewelry, coming across some lovely old family pieces in the process, like the bee brooch below. One of the dressers that needed to be cleared out to load for the move was my father-in-law Dale’s, which was somewhat disconcerting since he’s been dead since December of 2014, yet here were his socks and pajamas and miscellany left pretty much as they’d been when he was alive.
Mr. K is excellent at spatial geometry, so when it was time to pack the trailer we rented to tow behind our truck, we just followed the plan he’d made and the furniture and boxes fit in just so, with maximum stuff in the space available. We pulled out of Illinois on the 24th.
Towing the trailer meant getting much less range on a tank of gas, which meant we stopped in places we would usually zip right on by. That led to slower progress than usual, but also to seeing new things. One night, after having dinner in a big sort of sad diner in a town we’d never been to before, we saw this gorgeous sunset before getting back on the road.
We pulled up to our condo on the 27th, arriving while it was still light out so I could see the mountain was a bit more colorful than when we left.
After a good night’s sleep in our own bed, Mr. K continued on to Washington to unload the trailer and get the things either moved into Joan’s new apartment or into storage as appropriate, while I stayed at our place to do things like sort through three weeks of accumulated mail. Mr. K returned, sans trailer, a few days later.
All the photos fit to upload from this trip are over here on Flickr.