Three Days Home

I am home. We arrived home after midnight Monday, so I have actually been home for three days. The re-entry has been slow going. I keep thinking I will get a handle on being in this place again, but life keeps happening so I have decided that it may be awhile before I get a handle on things.

So here I am. Photos are still in the camera, safely I hope but who knows for sure, and I will post my favorites later.

The trip was indeed delightful, even more so than I expected.

Los Gatos, California, where my son and daughter-in-law live, is a beautiful city. Their apartment is in a quiet residential neighborhood and a short walk to the downtown area, which has every kind of shop, bakery, and restaurant that you could hope for. We enjoyed getting to know a bit about where they live, and we even had a chance to meet our son's co-workers. The sun shone every day, and there was a lovely breeze in the valley.

Then we stayed with friends in San Ramon, where we ate more good food, attended Shakespeare's Henry V in the park, enjoyed more good wine, and saw the movie Safety Not Guaranteed ~ all of which I highly recommend.

The drive up Highway 101 was beautiful, moving from the redwoods of California to the coast of Oregon, with ocean on one side and forest on the other. Portland, which is named for Portland, Maine we learned, is a great city. We stayed right downtown, where we could walk down to the waterfront, over to Powell's Books and The Real Mother Goose Shop, and up to the Museum of Art.

Before we knew it we were headed for Seattle, where we stayed at The Moore Hotel, a unique and interesting place where I hope to stay again. It was great to spend time with our son and see many of the city's sights. We experienced hot sunny days, cool nights, a cold blustery morning, and even a thunderstorm while we were there. Pike Place Market is at its best early in the morning, and the original Starbucks is not busy at 6:45 on a Thursday evening. The buses run fairly often and are a nice reprieve from climbing the steep hills.

Then it was time to come home. I wasn't ready, but I don't know when I would have been. It was wonderful to spend time with people I like, to eat good food and drink good wine, and to see new places. I like nice hotels. I love cities.

But it was time to come home to the woods, back to real life. I figured I would need a couple days to regroup, and thankfully I was able to schedule a massage for my second day home. My body was grateful.

Today I started to feel myself again. There are still piles of laundry to do because the dehumidifier in the laundry room has given up the ghost, but I did some research and decided which one to buy tomorrow. The skies cleared so I hung jeans on the line this afternoon.

Tuesday night I heated hot dogs in a fry pan, opened a bag of chips, and called it dinner. A bit of grocery shopping and some recouped energy later, we've had cold salads and fresh fruit to eat. I was pretty pleased with my CD selections this evening as I prepared pasta salad, until we realized that one of our seventeen-year-old speakers has bit the dust. More research and cost comparisons and we found a good deal on newegg.com. We can't live without our tunes:)

I haven't dared to turn on my laptop yet. The cord got really warm before we left, and the way things are falling apart around here I decided I better wait until I am ready to quickly download everything on it to a thumb drive before I start it up.

Fingers crossed that photos download to the desktop in good shape. We captured some moments we will savor for a long time. It was certainly a trip that I won't forget.

I am already making plans for next time....