Oregon Trail 2010 - Stage 1

All three of us in The Q had our reasons to to heed Horace Greeley's advice and "head west!"  I was looking forward to 4600 miles of windshield time across the Great American West, reason enough for me.  Inga was anxious to embark on setting up her first apartment, a big phase in one's life.  For Sue, this was to be our vacation, so she threw in a few pleasant detours to be taken before her return to Texas.

Grant of course had his Senior Year of High School to finish, which meant he was to be bach'ing it for 10 days in Garland.  For weeks ahead of our departure on the Oregon Trail, we offered to instruct him on basic cooking and decent meal preparation.  He declined, figuring that even if we bought him food to prepare for a variety of dinners, he would not bother to cook it.  So we layed in a large larder of Mac & Cheese and a couple of large frozen pizzas.  Otherwise, paraphrasing General William T. Sherman; "If food is purchased, I will not cook; if served, I will not eat."  The other concern was getting him to school [refer to earlier post: Bus(t)ed].  At the beginning of the school year, we expected Grant would simply get to the corner bus stop each morning.  But the district's new policy was to keep all high school students off the bus unless they were not enrolled in certain honors classes.  He dropped his honors class at the start of the year, thus loosing his tax-payer funded wheels.  Without too much hassle, his buddy Sam was employed to chauffeur Grant to and from campus .  But still, it gripes me something fierce.  With arrangements for the Boy and his dog made, we were ready to go West.

Sue finished up her work at Preston Hollow Presbyterian by mid-day on Wednesday, 9/15 and arrived home to finish packing.  She squeezed her vacation bags in between Inga's apartment gear and basic camping accouterments.  We waited for Grant to arrive home from school at 3 PM, heaped much advice upon his head and then left the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex before evening rush hour. Destination - Wichita Falls.

We had invited ourselves to the gracious home of Sue's brother Bill in Wichita Falls as a stage-stop before we began burning up the big miles on the odometer.  Bill and Susan Cook are just 150 miles out, which allowed us to arrived in time for Susan's sumptuous creamy chicken dinner and an evening of catch-up conversation.  We had miles and miles of Texas planned for the next day, so we turned in planning on an early start.  When we awoke, Bill had already left for work, as is his habit to get in before other distractions arrive.  Susan was also up before us to keep to her morning routine of excise with a friend.  We slugs, put ourselves together, called Bill to ask about how to lock up the house once we were really ready to be on the road.

With the rising sun in my rear view mirror, I head out on the highway with the longest of travel days before us.