A Trip Long Overdue
It's been a long time since I have seen my father. We are separated by the breadth of a continent, an ideological divide, and the ghosts of a past estrangement. I last saw him at my mother's funeral in 2017 though we have spoken regularly on the telephone in recent years. COVID and the financial restrictions of my forced retirement as a result of COVID have not helped us save the cash required for such a cross-continent trip. But finally, we were able to get to see him.
My father has been in poor health for several years. He spent much of the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 in the hospital and we were not sure that he would make it out, but he is a strong and cantankerous old bastard. He was released to home in early February, having exhausted everything that the hospital could do for him and is currently under hospice care.
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| The Two of Us |
This was no pleasure trip and I was in part looking forward to it and to reconnecting with my brother and sister and also dreading it in that I would have to confront my father's ill health head on, rather than from across the country. I was dreading seeing his debilitated state and worse still, having to come to grips with the idea that this will be the very last time that I see my father before he dies.
I have been speaking with my brother and sister fairly consistently in the last several months as Dad's health and physical ability have deteriorated to the point where I could no longer speak with him on the telephone. Getting updates from them via the phone was surely going to be very different than putting my eyes on him and seeing for myself. And it was.
I'm very glad that I got to see him and very sad at the same time that he has no quality of life left and will be moving on in the near future. Truth be told, I am also feeling a bit guilty (as well as grateful) that my brother and sister are devoting so much time to taking care of Dad at the end of his life.
Auburn, Alabama
In 1977 when my dad accepted a deanship with Auburn University, we relocated from my hometown of Charlottesville, VA in March of my freshman year of high school. I lived in Auburn just long enough to graduate from Auburn High and then return back home to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia with my childhood friends. For my younger siblings, Auburn is home and they live there still and are doing an amazing job of taking care of our father in his dotage. They raised their families there; I raised mine in Virginia. They connected more with friends there; I was always the outsider. Auburn means different things to us.
Even though Virginia is and will always be my home, I enjoyed my time in Auburn despite almost not graduating from Auburn High. When I arrived at the school at the tail end of my freshman year, I had nearly exhausted all the courses that the school had to offer. I took the SAT early and Auburn University offered me a slot, so I co-enrolled and spent most of my day there, rather than at the high school with my peers. Come high school graduation, I found myself a half a credit shy of the required number to matriculate.
The high school principal took my enrollment in the university as an indictment of his school (the truth hurts, doesn't it?) and refused to let me graduate until I went over his head by petitioning the School Board to accept my two full years of college credit for the missing high school half credit. Day to day, the principal made his disdain for me plain and never stopped trying to find an excuse to punish me for some infraction or other. For my part, I mainly ignored the small and small-minded shrew, biding my time to get back home to Virginia, where I would transfer to UVA after graduating.
There are things I love about the south and Auburn in particular: college football, magnolia blossoms, soul food, antebellum houses, the lilt of the southern drawl, politeness, and the seemingly slower pace of life. There are also things I do not love: blazing heat, sauna-like humidity, rampant conservatism, and inherent and systemic racism top the list. Despite this, I was looking forward to going back to see this town where I spent three formative years in the late 1970s.
Tuesday June 6
Reminiscences aside, getting to Alabama from Central Oregon is not a particularly easy feat in that there are no direct connections. The drill is to fly from Bend to Seattle and thence on to Atlanta, the busiest airport in the country and one which has been under construction all my life. Situated just across the Alabama-Georgia line, Auburn is about a two-hour drive from the airport, depending on traffic, construction, and the Georgia constabulary, in full force when we visited.
This cross-country trip is a long one, essentially a full day, and to arrive at a reasonable hour on the East Coast, already three hours ahead of us in Oregon, means a very early departure. Although first thing in the morning at our local airport (RDM - Redmond) is very busy, security takes a minute or two at most to get through. This is a good thing in that we never have to get to the airport too far ahead of boarding.
Our shuttle picked us up at the house at 0645 for our 0800 flight. Too bad for me that only slept from 0330 to 0520, a true crime and a bad start to a very long day. Our trip through security took twice as long as normal because someone (the female member of our party) forgot that she had a tiny nail file/corkscrew in her purse. She gladly donated it to TSA.
The early morning flight to Seattle afforded us the opportunity to see the amazing rock spires of Smith Rock State Park in the rich golden morning light, an inspiring sight for certain. All along the incredibly brief flight (perhaps 40-42 minutes in the air), we got to soak in the natural beauty of our home: Smith Rock, Gray Butte, Three Sisters, Black Butte, Three-Fingered Jack, Mt. Washington, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and king of them all, Mt. Ranier. As we made our way north along Puget Sound to land from the north, the Olympics were in beautiful form, snow caps gleaming in the brilliant morning sun.
The flight into Atlanta was boringly normal, except for a good bit of bumps coming through the cloud layer northwest of town as we skirted a decent-sized thunderstorm. Because of the storm, we were held up on the taxiway as the controllers dropped a long line of planes onto the runway trying to get them on the ground as soon as possible. Half an hour would elapse before we got to our gate. The blast of hot, humid air as we exited the plane was a shock to our systems, well-inured to the low humidity and moderate temperatures of Central Oregon.
On the ground, we made the long schlep to the Rental Car Center via two trains. By the time we got our car and left the parking garage, it was about 1900 and rush hour traffic was mainly behind us. Fortunately, heading to Alabama southwest on I-85 is going away from the main snarls in downtown Atlanta, a town blessed with shitty traffic.
The coffee shop, occupying a beautiful old house that I want to date to the 1910s, is really well appointed and to my (jaded by PNW coffee quality) great surprise, serves a great cup of coffee, so good that we would return the next day for our morning cup. The students that staff the shop are unfailingly polite and would "ma'am" Ann over and over. Welcome to the south where failure to ma'am or sir someone is to invite a backhand to the jaw from your mother. I have read that some women out our way object to being called ma'am, but I am happy to report that at least in Auburn AL, manners still apply.
Caffeinated at last, we made the short drive from downtown to my old house also in central Auburn where we would see my father for the first time since my mother's funeral in 2017. I really had no idea what to expect given his deteriorated state. I can say that the whole experience left me drained. Although I was mentally prepared to see my dad in decline, the reality of it hit me pretty hard. The man that I last saw ambulatory and in shock at his wife's passing is largely confined to home and sits most of the day, moving a few feet here and there courtesy of a walker.
The host was a good sport and put us off in a section where there were no customers and where we could easily maneuver the wheelchair. Dad, having left his reading glasses at home, made a big show of using Ann's readers to look at the menu. I don't think he can read any longer and with some input from him, I ordered some food for him. I cannot say that my miserable barbacoa tacos were like anything you might find on the West Coast. Despite the crappy food, the Modelo beer was cold and we still managed to have a decent time with Dad. And he clearly enjoyed being out of the house.
After resting for a few hours, we decided not to go back for Dad's dinner hour on the theory that he was exhausted from our late lunch expedition and probably would not be coherent. At early dinner time, we walked from our B&B into downtown to a beer taproom, hoping to get a decent beer (not yet having concluded that such does not exist in Alabama).
We brought enough bao and pork belly buns for the four of us, but Elaine wasn't going to touch Chinese food because of her silly notion that the Chinese use cats for meat. Dad doesn't eat much, but did manage to eat a bao. Ann and I were disappointed in the quality and flavor of both the buns and bao. We have been spoiled.
I had never met Betsy before and Ann had last seen her something on the order of 20 years prior. She's a pistol just like Ann and is blessed with Ann's short stature. And they are both are fantastic decorators; Ann could have decorated her house, which is just the cutest little cottage set way back off the street in a wooded neighborhood. Our two-hour visit went far too quickly before Betsy had to go to the doctor and we had to scramble back to Auburn for dinner with Kathy and John.
After my sister Kathy and her husband John got off work, we met them downtown for the Friday night ArtWalk that consists of closed streets, live music, food trucks, and booth after booth of small art vendors. For us, the temperatures were extreme as we walked from our B&B; those who live in Auburn no doubt found it pleasant enough.
The place was a mad-house when we arrived around 9:30 with but one or two spots in the parking lot and a line five deep at all the registers. After ordering, we were lucky to find a seat in which to wait for our breakfast. Although there were probably forty orders ahead of ours, our wait was only about ten minutes.
Back at the B&B, we ate our dinner, drank a couple of beers, and left the rest in the fridge for the next guests. We hit the sack early in preparation for our 5:30am departure for the airport in Atlanta.
The trip proved to be as difficult if not more difficult than I imagined. Seeing Dad in his seriously weakened state was awful as was seeing the woeful condition of the house and yard that I lived in so early in my life. I'm glad to have had a chance to say goodbye to Dad, something I did not get with my mother who died suddenly in her sleep. Moreover, I am happy to have seen my siblings and expressed my gratitude to them for taking care of Dad. And finally as a bonus, I am really happy to have met Ann's birth mom Betsy. It is so good to be home.
Alabama and Georgia are separated by the Chattahoochee River; the river also marks the boundary between Eastern time and Central time, so we arrived in Auburn at 2000, 2100 at the airport and 1800 back home. Most places in Auburn, despite being a college town, were trying to close at 2100, leaving us just an hour to try to find somewhere to eat, before going to our AirBnB. We chose the likely sounding Auburn Draft House as a potentially decent place to get a cold beer and a quick meal.
To quote Ann upon reviewing the meager pickings among the 24 or so taps, "Boy, are we spoiled for beer!" We finally found a weak hazy from a local Alabama brewery. It would not pass muster in Oregon, but it was the best beer we had all week in Auburn.
At 2130, we headed for our room and on entry, discovered that the place had not been turned, bedding linens and towels heaped all around. We called the owner who was suitably mortified with her cleaning service and she sent us to another of her properties which we could not find in the dark, despite my having lived in Auburn during high school.
Not wanting to screw with it any longer, we headed for a cluster of hotels near the interstate and booked a room at the Hampton Inn. They had one room left with double queens for an exorbitant price which we reluctantly took, knowing that we would be reimbursed by our B&B host. When we opened the door, our long day got longer: this room had not been turned either. We left for the Marriott across the street and got a much nicer room for half the price. We were well and truly exhausted as we turned in for the night.
Wednesday June 7
Up at 1000 local time, we needed coffee and knowing that our best chance to find Dad alert was closer to lunch time, we drove downtown to a coffee house that Ann had found for us, one that is directly across the street from the police station, a building that I had visited many times as a teen. The police station that I knew was a decidedly ugly and utilitarian 1970s one-story blob with a flat roof. What I saw when I drove down the street toward the station was not at all what I was expecting. The city has built a beautiful Public Safety building, containing a fire station and a multi-story police station, a really good looking work of architecture.
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| A Great Cup of Coffee |
Another aspect of being in the South is to be firmly enfolded into the bosom of the Bible Belt. Church is de rigueur on Sunday and religion pervades the culture. This particular coffee shop makes no bones of it, hosting Bible study, offering prayer cards, and featuring walls hung with crosses and religious quotations. We came to refer to our morning cup of coffee as "Joe with Jesus."
I would be remiss to mention Christianity in the South without mentioning the other pervasive religion: big-time college football. The town of Auburn is largely a shrine to the Auburn Tiger football team and much of the town is decked out in the university colors of orange and blue. It is impossible in this town, where even my high school football team got a police escort to the stadium on Friday nights, to miss the unending sea of AU memorabilia and regalia. Even the garbage trucks have blue cabs and orange bodies!
Just inside the back door to the coffee shop where most customers enter, the parking being in the rear, hangs a sign asking patrons to check under their cars for the shop mascot, Ross the cat, before leaving. Ross is a friendly sort who hangs around out back looking for any affection he can get.
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| Mascot Ross the Cat Featured on the Coasters |
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| Ross, Playing Oh-So Hard-to-Get |
Harder still for me to accept is the mental decline of a guy who was always the smartest in the room. Although he had stretches of lucidity when we could have a conversation after a fashion, he had other periods when he was out of it, or was cantankerous, or acting like a five-year old: giggling after his hired help had called him on his abusive language, knowing that he was in trouble but not likely to stop his bad behavior.
His mouth, blatant misogyny, and bucking all the help from his 24x7 caregivers has chased off homecare-giver after homecare-giver. Ann and I found ourselves frequently trying to smooth the ruffled feathers of his various caregivers during our visits with him over the week. If he keeps up with the abuse, he will have no alternative than to be institutionalized and that is a horrifying thought for me. The women that care for him now are angels. How much more of his crap they can tolerate, who can say?
We arrived around 1130, having been told that lunchtime is one of the periods in the day in which he is most often alert, planning to stay with him during his lunch until he knocked out for his afternoon nap. He insisted and insisted that he wanted Mexican food for lunch and I was gearing up to go hunt some down and bring it back to him. But no. He absolutely insisted that we take him out for lunch.
Knowing because he is not mobile that this would be an epic challenge, Ann and I tried to talk him out of it over and over. Finally, we relented, but when we asked his helper how to assemble his wheelchair that lives in the back of his car, he insisted that he would walk and would not be using a wheelchair. Ann got pretty firm with him (he knows she will not take shit off anyone so he keeps it in check with her) and told him, "No wheelchair, no lunch." He finally acceded and after a laborious struggle to get him into his chair lift and down the back stairs and outside to the car, a process of some ten minutes, we set forth in search of Mexican food.
His helper warned us that she thought that the restaurant for which he was aiming had been long closed. Dad could not articulate what part of town we were headed for, but he seemed to have some idea of where we were going, so with his input and a lot of Google support, we got headed in a vague northeast direction. At one point, he asked me to turn up a street that I knew to be totally residential. I told him that, but he insisted, so I made the turn. A few hundred yards up the street, he said, "I retract the turn." No kidding.
Still not having any idea where we were going, I headed for the nearest road containing a lot of restaurants, hoping that we would drive past something that he would recognize. Google showed several Mexican options to the right, so we went that way. As we were driving along, he said we should have gone left so I figured out how to do a U-turn on a busy four-lane highway while Ann searched the internet for restaurants back the other direction. Fortunately, she came up with the name of a place not far away and Dad responded positively to the name she gave him.
When we got there and pulled into an open handicapped space directly in front of the restaurant in a pretty full parking lot, Dad questioned whether the restaurant were open. I assured him that the blazing neon OPEN sign and the full parking lot were good signs.
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| Using Ann's Reading Glasses to "Read" |
I asked him how often he got to get out for lunch and he responded "Never!" Given the huge production that it is to get him out of the house, I totally understand why. Fortunately, I am a very patient person and was not in a hurry to be anywhere, so for him, this once, it was feasible to take him out. But once was enough.
Once we got the show packed up and returned to his house, he was exhausted and ready to sleep, so we got him in his chair and left to go back to the B&B and get some space between us and what we had just witnessed.
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| Sunflowers Near our AirBnB |
On the walk to the taproom, we noticed a lot of birds that we used to see on the East Coast which we sorely miss on the West Coast: Northern Cardinal, Northern Mockingbird, Red-Bellied Woodpecker, and Carolina Wren all come to mind. We also passed a lot of trees and shrubs that we do not see out west: Sassafras, Water Oak, Willow Oak, giant Pecans, and magnificent Magnolias, just coming into bloom. For me, these are very nostalgic things. One, however, that is not is kudzu, the vine introduced from Japan that is in the process of eating the South. Kudzu I miss not one iota.
The taproom turned out to be self-serve: an electronic card activates each of the taps and records how many ounces of beer you pour for yourself. We sampled small quantities of a lot of beers in the empty taproom, it being summer semester and college kids looking for cheap beer rather than craft beer, finding nothing of any merit. Although we are spoiled by living in one of the great beer meccas of the country, we've found great beer everywhere we have visited in this country. As an exception to this rule, we are sad to report that we found no great beer in Alabama.
While we were enjoying the air conditioning of the tap room, the sun was going lower and lower in the sky and we searched the internet for some place to go have a decent dinner. We settled on an American restaurant a few blocks away and arrived just as it was getting dark to find it packed and on a half-hour wait, despite students being out for the summer. It gets dark at least an hour earlier in Alabama than in Oregon.
After a cocktail at the bar, we finally got a table for two outside on the sidewalk just as the streetlight popped on. We ordered the safest wine on the tiny list (a name brand California sparkler) and got both seafood entrees on the menu, shrimp and grits for Ann and grilled catfish for me. The catfish was really decent, while the shrimp and grits were utterly forgettable.
The walk back to the B&B in the dark was far nicer than the walk out in the blazing heat. We turned in some time after midnight, still being on West Coast time.
Wednesday June 8
After our lunch excursion the day before, neither Ann nor I were eager to repeat the experience. My sister Kathy had texted the evening before that Dad was expressing a desire to go back out to lunch. To forestall this, we decided to pick up some lunch after our morning coffee and bring it with us. We chose a local bao shop, hoping to bring him something a bit unusual. I'm impressed to find bao in Alabama.
We arrived to find him in the middle of a battle with his homecare worker, whom we are certain that he had insulted just before we arrived. He really is not that nice in his old age. We spent a few minutes getting everyone off the ledge, Ann talking to Dad and me trying to appease Elaine. This woman has the patience of Job!
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| Pork Belly Buns |
With Dad nearly out of it after lunch, I had a chance to take in the dismaying state of the house and yard. The house is in poor condition with the deck rotted to the point that it has been taped off with yellow caution tape. I am afraid that when Dad passes, the only sensible thing to do will be to sell the house as-is to someone who wants to bulldoze it and build a new home on the acre-and-a-quarter double lot.
This large wooded lot (sweetgum, tupelo, cottonwood, and water oak) is bordered on two sides by creeks and is quiet and private. With its location near to downtown, it will make someone a fabulous home site. But currently, it feels more like a jungle with Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and greenbrier vines attacking the house and the kudzu down by the main creek taking over as it will. Even though my brother generously mows the grass every couple of weeks, it is a far cry from the yard that I used to labor over so intensely to make it look sharp. And it is a perfect metaphor for my father, the consummate gardener who took intense pride in his gardens, but who now sits in ruins in a chair all day.
Already down from seeing the condition of Dad and the house, we left shortly after lunch to recuperate in the air conditioning of our B&B. We would go back at dinner time on the chance that Dad might be more alert. It would also be our first opportunity to see my sister Kathy as she made her post-work visit with Dad to supervise his supper and nightly routine. Because we had dinner plans with my brother Mac and his wife Laura, we did not stay all that long. We invited Kathy and her husband John to dinner the following evening while we were there.
We met Mac and Laura at a small storefront Italian café on the south side of town, a place that is special to them. They had both just come from work. Mac is the new head coach of the Southern Union women's soccer team. Because this is a brand-new Juco team, he has just come off a long recruiting drive and is now putting his team for the fall through spring training. Laura is the head pharmacist at the regional hospital. They are just back from a trip to Italy and nearby parts of Europe and so this dominated a lot of our dinner conversation. Better to talk of happy things.
We, Ann and I, generally do not eat Italian when we dine out merely because she is full-blooded Italian and I am a chef and we can cook better Italian food at home. Still, our pasta was probably the best food we had during our entire trip and our conversation with Mac and Laura was great. We closed the place down and left reluctantly to let the restaurant clean up for the night.
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| Mac and Laura |
Friday June 9
Ann comes from an Italian family whose roots are in both Calabria and Bari in southern Italy. But she is adopted. She found out that she was adopted in her 40s when she had already had her son Carter. Crazy internet sleuth that she is, she managed to sew together various threads of information about her birth mother and actually found her, living in Newnan GA, a commuter town southwest of Atlanta. As we were heading towards Alabama on I-85, we passed the exits for Newnan and that made me think of Ann's birth mother Betsy, whose family comes from Naples as apparently does Ann's birth father who is unknown to us.
Coincidentally (or telepathically) enough, when we awoke late Wednesday morning, there was a missed call on Ann's phone from Betsy. This is especially coincidental in that they may speak once a year on average. Ann called back and Betsy said she called because she was thinking of Ann. At this point, Betsy had no inkling that we were in the Atlanta area until Ann told her and asked if we could visit with her just briefly. We scheduled that for Friday at noon with the caveat that Betsy had an appointment at 2; the visit would necessarily be brief.
Because of the time change, we needed to leave Auburn at 9 to be in Atlanta at noon and given that we were on West Coast time, that meant we needed to be awake and on the road by 7am Pacific, an awfully early morning for us. Traffic was a non-issue until we reached the I-85/I-20 interchange where we exited in the direction of Augusta which afforded us great views of the Georgia State House whose dome is covered in gold leaf from the mines in Dahlonega in north Georgia.
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| Ann's Birth Mother Betsy |
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| Kathy and John |
Given that it was hot, loud, and crowded, I urged that we seek shelter somewhere inside to cool off, have a drink, and eat some dinner. I also wanted talk and catch up, not having seen Kathy and John in several years. We ended up following John into a barbeque place in the thick of the goings-on downtown. It was no less quiet and no less crowded, but at least we could sit in the AC and yell at each other to be heard.
Last we saw them, John had just finished an advanced degree after his career in the Navy and had just accepted a job working with the legislature in the state capital of Montgomery, to which he commutes every day. He still has that job and plans to go for another three years. Kathy was working for the Athletic Department coaching athletes; she currently has a similar job helping engineering students stay up with their coursework. They are adjusting to being empty nesters
Kathy staked out a table in the wall-to-wall busy joint while John and I ordered food at the back counter and Ann pushed through the crowd to the bar to try to find something cold to drink. There was one so-called IPA that we ended up getting, but it was an IPA in name only. The kids at the bar were enthusiastically trying to sell Ann $5 pitchers of Budweiser, a beer that I would pay you $5 to drink for me.
I really didn't have any expectations of great food at what is essentially a college kid hangout, but I could at least hope. The barbeque met my expectations: really not very good. There was a place called Price's that had fantastic barbeque when I lived there, but that closed many years ago. And we would find that another old school smokehouse had stopped serving barbeque for want of help. The consensus favorite barbeque place in Auburn serves Texas barbeque and I did not travel to Alabama for Texas barbeque.
The heat and noise, on top of a day that saw us drive four hours to spend two hours in Atlanta, finally did us in and Ann and I begged off to head back to the B&B for an early night in the quiet and AC. We turned in late and I tossed and turned all night, being constantly serenaded by the loudest bunch of Mockingbirds.
Saturday June 10
By Saturday morning, we were pretty exhausted and looking to wrap up our last day in Auburn and get started on our journey home. I really wanted Ann to experience a southern breakfast so I planned to take her to local favorite Byron's Smokehouse. Even though Byron's started after I left Auburn, it has become an institution there and was the heir apparent to Price's when it closed.
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| Breakfast at Byron's Eggs, Sausage, Grits, Biscuits and Gravy |
We had planned to come back later in the day to pick up some barbeque and sides to take back to the B&B for an early dinner in preparation for a very early morning departure for the airport. But while we were waiting for our breakfast, Ann went back to the counter to refill her coffee and encountered the owner. In the course of their chat, he said that they had stopped serving barbeque in favor of doing only breakfast and catering for want of employees, a very common refrain in all service businesses in this post-COVID era. We would have to opt for plan B for dinner.
Our breakfast, a typical southern carb fest, came out pretty quickly. Between us we had biscuits and gravy, smoked sausage, grits, and eggs. It was all good but we are spoiled by my biscuits and gravy and the grits that I had custom milled for the restaurant. Ann really did like the black pepper in the gravy. My most recent iterations of gravy tend more to red pepper flakes with a lot of sage and thyme.
Breakfast behind us, we went to see Dad who had gone out with Kathy and John to breakfast with one of Dad's old friends while Ann and I were asleep. Dad was totally out of it when we arrived and when he was not asleep was pretty incoherent, so to avoid listening to any more BS on Fox News which Dad has on constantly, Ann and I excused ourselves back to the B&B in hopes of visiting toward dinner time when he might be more with it. We returned around 4:30 to find him fairly alert. Despite that, he had no recollection of breakfast or seeing his friend.
We started trying to leave to find some dinner around 6 and it took us 45 minutes to get out. Dad was fully aware that we were leaving to go back to Oregon and it upset him greatly. We battled through a few bouts of tears and goodbyes. He was able to articulate that he was happy that we came to see him, but not much more. Each time he would be overcome by emotion, he would find a way to deflect that, such as "having to go to the bathroom." In the end, he could just never to bring himself to address the emotion that he very clearly feels. He has been this way his entire life.
In the course of the afternoon, we quizzed Kathy and dad's helper on the state of fried chicken in Auburn, Ann having decided that she would like fried chicken for dinner in lieu of barbeque. My feeling was that we could just stop at the local Kroger for decent chicken and the ladies seemed to confirm that this would be a decent choice.
Badly needing a beer and to get out of Dad's house after the emotional farewell and a non-stop diet of Fox News, we beat feet for the Kroger and arrived just as the hot bar was closing at 7. We each got meals with two pieces of dark meat (and a third thrown in because "it's just going in the dumpster" at closing time) with two sides for $7 apiece, a deal. I got collards and black-eyed peas; the Yankee with me got two helpings of macaroni and cheese as her sides.
After getting our dinner, we stopped in the beer section which consisted of long, long coolers of suitcases of every Anheuser Busch product and a tiny cooler labeled Craft Beer. We managed among all the non-craft beers to find a six of the hazy that we had on Tuesday night at the Draft House, Goatopia from Goat Island Brewing in Cullman AL. It probably would not make it out in the PNW, but it was the single best beer we had on our trip.
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| The Best Beer of Our Trip |
Sunday June 11
We got up at 5:25 am and after brushing our teeth, were in the car and on the road at 5:35. After gassing up and then stopping yet again to top off the tank just before the airport, we arrived at the Rental Car Center at 8:10, an hour and fifty minutes before our flight was to depart. In spite of some light rain, we made great time to the airport and thought we'd have plenty of time to get both breakfast and something to bring on the plane for lunch.
Boy, were we wrong! From the Rental Car Center, we took the SkyTrain over to the North Terminal and entered the line for security with thousands of others. We wound and wound through the line at the terminal and ultimately got to the security scanners. By the time we got past security and took the train to the D gates, it was getting on towards 9:30. When we arrived at the gate, the plane was half boarded. So much for getting any food.
Once we were seated on the 737, we could see that it was raining more intensely. We went through several periods of serious squalls and I remarked to Ann that we were undoubtedly going to be on ground stop for some time before leaving. In fact, we pushed back from the gate and were held for 20 minutes before getting clearance to taxi. The remainder of the flight went uneventfully and we made up most if not all of the delay en route, arriving in Seattle a couple hours before our flight into Redmond.
Item one of business was to find a decent beer and some breakfast/lunch/dinner. We grabbed two counter seats at the first bar we came to and ordered a hazy. The first sip proved to be delicious and about a thousand times better than the canned ones we had the night before. It was so good to be back on the West Coast. From Seattle, our quick flight into Redmond would prove to be uneventful.
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| Mt. St. Helens with its Missing Top en Route to SeaTac |
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