Home at Last

Home at Last

Judi and I (Plus two cats, Jonesie and Jason) came home from our cross country trip yesterday, the 30th of June, 2018, a trek that began 30 days ago.

I don't usually include real life events in the Warcraft blog, but since there hasn't been a warcraft post for the past month, I figured it might be interesting to describe what we did on our sort of vacation. 
We have done cross country trips a least four times that I can remember. One of those trips was in a rented RV when we moved from the east coast to California for the first time. That was the impetus later when we decided to buy our own RV, which we have used several times over the course of the years. Our trusty RV is a 27 footer with no sliders and a 350 cylinder engine that struggles mightily on the steeper grades. But it's ours, and we love it. That didn't disuade us and we've had some great adventures in that RV.

 Now we were planning another cross country trip to South Carolina for a reunion of Judi's family. What made the trip even more special was that we had recently discovered some new family ties that happened to be living nearby here in California. What a coincidence! Our new relatives and us bonded pretty quickly and they decided they would fly out to join the reunion.

On the day we planned to start our RV trip we loaded up the RV and headed for our first stop in Kingman, Arizona, a 6-7 hour journey. Two of our best furry travelers, the boys Jason and Jonesie, were tagged to come with us. It was a blistering 103 degrees outside. About two-thirds of the way to Kingman, our air conditioning unit started to fail. There was absolutely nowhere to stop between us and Kingman. The cabin became increasingly heated and Jason nearly died. We took cold water from our two coolers  to keep him cool and thankfully we made it to Kingman. Jason recovered.

Now we had a decision to make. We could try to get the A/C working, but fixing it might take days or longer. We were stuck. The issue was the heat.  We couldn't go on without a functioning A/C. We had to abort the trip and return home. We made our return trip home in the dead of night while it was cool enough to keep the cats safe.

 That was a hard blow, but we weren't going to give up. The RV was going to be out of action for some time. So we decided to take my car, a buick rendezvous. Imagine the two of us, with our two cats, and a car filled with everything we needed for our cats, including food, toys, litter boxes, etc. And of course our own needs. We crossed the country, staying at hotels that accepted cats. That was quite a challenge, but there are a number hotels and motels that allow cats.  We were fortunate that we had only one motel that was so bad we knew we couldn't stay there and we had find another.

We had a number of other catastrophes with the car. The steering wheel began to pull to the right early during the drive, but it was a mild pull that I only started to notice when Judi saw that I was having to compensate to keep the car on a straight path. That was the start of our next nightmare. We had reached our destination for the days motel stay, but we had not actually gotten to it yet when a man on the interstate attempted suicide not far ahead of us. Every road surrounding the town we were in was locked down. It was literally hours before we were able to get to our motel. With darkness falling we finally got to the motel - and it was the one hotel that was so nasty we couldn't stay there.  Judi did some emergency checking around and we found another hotel that took cats. Finally.

The next day we spent most of the day getting the car straightened out. The shop did a good job getting it fixed. What made us smile is that during the work the car had to be raised and lowered several times and driven around to ensure that everything was working correctly. We asked if the cats had to be taken out and they said no. If we were okay with it then they were. The two cats caused no trouble and even seemed to enjoy it.

 We made it to South Carolina for the reunion and stayed a few days for visiting. We then drove to Virginia to see my Mom and other relatives there. While we were at Mom's house we made several drives (about 30 minutes each) to see other relatives in the area. We took Mom's car for those trips.
Sadly, we also had a death in the family while in Virginia. My uncle Dane, who I dearly love, had been fighting cancer and passed away shortly before we had to leave. I am blessed that we were there to be with him and all our relatives. We will miss him greatly.

So, when all the visiting was over, I took my car to the local Juffy Lube to get an oil change for the drive back. Just an oil change.

 A few days after we got back on the road we started having problems with the car. At first I thought it was a bad tire, but the tires were good and were properly inflated. On the road it felt okay at interstate speed, but at slower speeds it felt like we were driving over bumpy roads. In part I'm sure that some of it was the various state of the roads we drove over, but that couldn't account for all of that. We suspect the Jiffy Lube did more than just do an oil change. The tires had been recently rotated (remember the issues earlier with the veering, and the tires were rotated at that time) and I suspect they were rotated again at the Jiffy Lube, which put them back out of alignment. I think. We couldn't tell.

The car is in the driveway now, but I will be taking it to our own mechanic today to give it a thorough checkup.

The rest of the trip went pretty well. We did some more visiting after leaving Mom's, including trips to friends and relatives in Tennessee. We took some extra time there to visit friends and also to see if we might want to settle there some day. The state is beautiful, but it's not for us.

We still cling to California. For how long, time will tell.