Home With the Truck

The husband preferred not to fly to Seattle to get the new truck, and because I need only the slimmest of reasons to hit the highway, we decided to take a road trip together to get it. We alerted DD#2 that we were coming. She offered to make us dinner at her apartment.

We pulled out of the driveway at 7:02 a.m. on Thursday and were pulling into her apartment complex by 3:30 p.m. (We gained an hour on the way.) The husband had gone to Tacoma for DD#1’s college graduation, but he had never been to Seattle. He got to see where she is living, and we sat and visited with her while she cooked us dinner.

I had reserved a hotel room down by the airport, just because it split the distance between Seattle and Tacoma and I knew the area. The sales manager at Tacoma Dodge said he would meet us at 7:30 a.m. Friday morning. We woke up, had a leisurely breakfast at iHop, and met Paul—huge props to him for making this come together—at the dealer’s office to sign the paperwork for the truck.

It is a beauty and exactly what the husband wanted:

This is our seventh Dodge Cummins turbo diesel pickup, starting with the truck we bought in 1990 in Pennsylvania. Two of them—the 2500 that is now our plow truck, and the MegaCab—were mine.

We navigated ourselves out of the big city with me leading the convoy. As much as I love to drive, that was a grueling trip—two back-to-back 9+ hour days on the road is more than I am used to, although we lucked out and had two gorgeous days of clear, sunny weather. I was planning to go visit DD#2 the second week of March, but after this trip, I’ve decided to postpone that visit until April.

We powered through and were home by 6:30 p.m. last night. Elysian had come over and taken care of the chickens for us. No peeps yet, although there are still a couple of hens fighting over who gets to sit on eggs in that box.

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I would have preferred not to postpone the comforter-tying party, but I didn’t know if we would be back in time. Depending on how things went, we might have stayed in Spokane last night. The husband needs to be back at work by Monday. He is scheduling jobs well out into the summer now.

The claims agent from Safeco finally called him while we were on the road Thursday. I have no idea how that is going to shake out, but at least the process is underway.

I have no shortage of things to do. The red Candy Coated is still waiting for the rest of its quilting. The generator cover is back in the queue once the generator gets put on the new truck. DD#2 has a set of patio furniture in need of custom cushions and pillows. And gardening season gets underway in just a few weeks, because it will be time to start seedlings in the greenhouse and prune fruit trees. Open burning starts March 1. We have slash piles in the woods that need to be dealt with. We lost another tree in last week’s windstorm. As always happens this time of year, spring comes slowly, then all at once.