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May 14-18
May 19 May 20-21 May 22 May 23 May 24 May 25-26 May 27 May 28 May 29 May 30 May 31-June 1 June 2-3 June 4 June 5 June 6-8 |
Thursday, May 14
We left home about 8am and had an uneventful drive to Billings with a stop for lunch in Casper. I think we've found a new "home" in Billings - The Boothill Inn. Reasonable prices, nice beds, good breakfast, cookies in the evening, decent parking, and a good internet connection. Dinner was with Kelly at MacKenzie River Pizza. The beer was toooooo good. Yummy flatbreads. Friday, May 15 What a long day! Most of I-90 in Montana is under construction! I think they've decided to repair all the bridges and overpasses at once.... And each one entailed dropping the speed limit and narrowing the roadway to just the right hand shoulder. A couple of times, we were rerouted off the exit and back up the other side. And the road over the pass between Montana and Idaho was suddenly reduced to one lane each direction - I was driving at the time and felt like I was on a bobsled. The lane had concrete barriers on each side... Luckily, the truck behind me had good brakes.... And, once the construction finished, we had a really big thunderstorm. Other than that... we're in Ritzville, WA, for the night. Very glad this long day is over. Lunch was at a MacKenzie River Pizza in Butte, MT, on Elizabeth Warren Ave... However, they didn't have any flatbread!!! So, we ordered sandwiches instead. They were huge! We should have split just one... Dinner was at The Ritz Roadhouse in Ritzville with a new waitress - she'd only been on the job one week.... Good BBQ, however. Our waitress (Alice) looked like a cross between Penny of Big Bang Theory and Breanne of Game of Thrones..... Saturday, May 16 An uneventful drive to Sequim today with a stop in Silverdale for lunch (Panera Bread) and a grocery store for supplies for the next couple of days. We arrived at Mom's about 4 and met Diane from Home Instead. Nice lady. John (my brother) and Michelle (his wife) were here while we were fixing dinner. We had a nice visit. Sunday, May 17 We spent the day at Mom's. I did a couple small loads of laundry and copied the images John had made by scanning Mom and Dad's old slides so that Jenny and I get copies of them. I also copied all the personal stuff off of Mom's computer. It's time to retire it. She hadn't used it in over a year and it was just collecting dust and taking up space. Carl spent the day doing some electrical work - a new LED light for her garage which is much brighter than the old flourescent one and rewired the other two, converting them to plug-ins, so that they can also be replaced if desired. I pulled weeds... Dinner was here, with Carl cooking again. We went to bed early. Monday, May 18 We left Mom's a little after 8am and ran into a bad traffic jam in Tacoma!! More road construction. And the traffic through Seattle was stop and go. We had lunch in Mt. Vernon, WA. Good sandwiches at a local diner. It took about half an hour to cross the border into Canada - with about ten stations working busily. There's just a lot of traffic crossing the border at this point. We got a chuckle from the border guard when he heard our answer to why we were in Washington (since it seemed to be out of our way, coming from Denver). The answer? An obligatory mother-in-law visit. We parked car at the long term parking lot at the airport. It's a decent lot and, with advance reservations made on-line, cost about a third what it would have cost us to park at the cruise terminal's lot. It also saved us the hassle of actually driving in downtown Vancouver, which had a lot of buildingconstruction. We had a very nice shuttle driver, who didn't seem to mind our confusion on exactly where we needed to get off the shuttle to find a taxi. We wound up getting off the second time we reached the taxi stand.... We finally got our four suitcases and four carry-on size bags into a taxi which took us to our hotel – Granville Island Hotel. He was a very interesting taxi driver. He'd been all over the world in his lifetime. He was originally from India, then went to several other countries before winding up in Vancouver. We walked around Granville Island for a while. It's an interesting combination of art shops, bohemian lifestyles, city market, and tourist stuff. On the recommendation of the receptionist at the hotel, we had dinner at The Sandbar. Yum. Good food, good wine. Excellent recommendation. The receptionist (Katie) was very helpful the whole time we were there. And, yes, I mentioned her help in the follow-up hotel stay review. After dinner, we wandered a little looking in shop windows – everything out here closes at 7, unless it's a restaurant or bar... This was followed with drinks at the hotel's patio bar watching sailboats come home for the evening. Our helpful receptionist also made arrangements for our tickets for the Hop-on, Hop-off Trolley tomorrow. |