The Journey Begins

Day 1 – 09/15/2018

Today is the big day! We are leaving on our 4 week sabbatical trip. We are excited to be visiting 8 states over a 4 week period and sharing it with you. The plan is to see more of Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and then back up the Oregon Coast. We plan to spend almost a week in Colorado seeing family. Then we will be spending several days in McKinney Texas visiting my sister, Julie, and my mom. Then we will start our return trek through New Mexico, Arizona, California and finish it with a 3 day drive up the Oregon coast.

The day started off great except for the part where we planned to leave by 6am and missed that mark a little over an hour. The plan was to drive to Mitchell Oregon and get there early enough to get some sunset pictures of the Painted Hills. After driving for a while we stopped to fill up with gas and get some snacks. I went to open the back tailgate on the car. Since I rarely drive it any more I didn’t know which button to push. In typical “guy fashion” I just started pushing buttons hoping one would work. Eventually one did and the tailgate opened…..about 12 inches. Apparently I had pushed the memory button and set the tailgate to only open a little. We struggled through that and got back on the road while Debby took up some leisurely reading of the owners manual. After fixing the tailgate, everything seemed to be going well again until our next stop. The dogs were begging us to give them a drink of water so we found a nice little park and stopped to let them all have a drink of water. They thanked us profusely and ran around and did their doggy business. As soon as we got back in the car, Drizzt thanked us again by throwing up all the water he had just downed along with his entire breakfast, all over floor of the back seat and everything we had stuffed into it. We proceeded to clean up Drizzt’s gift and headed down the road again. We finally reached Mitchell and the rest of the day went smoothly. We got some nice pictures of the Painted Hills as hoped and then spent the rest of the evening relaxing in a very nice AirBnB home. Thanks again Larry!!!