A Weekend Away

It says something very nice about the relationship I have with my daughter that we can take a week-end out of town in which pretty much everything went pear-shaped…and we still had a lovely time.

For my birthday, we were going to drive down to Portland for an antique paper show – postcards, stamps, and other ephemera.  We hadn’t gone down for one of the Portland shows for quite a few years, so when we planned it in early February it seemed like a good idea.  The entire lead-up became stressful because of the  unusual end-of-February cold snap which brought snow in fits and starts for three days from here down to Portland.  After haunting the weather and DOT sites during that period, we finally decided to just do it.

There were no disasters or accidents…but….there were slushy roads, an obnoxious refrigerator hums in our hotel room, bloody noses (more than one), two really bad meals, a toothache, and temperatures that stayed around 20 degrees day and night.  The paper show was in an old armory building with incredibly inadequate heating, filthy rest rooms, and seating that gave my daughter a back ache and really pained my poor old arthritic hips.  We even managed to get lost in South Tacoma on our way home.

I’ll admit we did have one nice meal of take-away Chinese, the hotel had enough pillows, and we lucked into a great craft shop in Centralia called Cindy’s Simple Stuff. It’s a delightful little shop with lots of variety for any of the paper arts and lots of ribbon at killer prices.  If you are in the area…do not miss it. http://cindyssimplestuff.blogspot.com/

One rather wonderful thing happened on the trip, one of those things that makes you realize your child has really, finally, become an adult.  After 35 plus years of  traveling together, for the very first time, she got out of bed before I did on Sunday morning and started packing things up.  I just laid there in bed watching in amazement.  It was wonderful!  And hopefully it wasn’t just because she was in a hurry to get home.