A Migratory Bird

Anyone who knows me knows that I get twitchy if I can’t take a road trip every couple of months. The husband says I am a migratory bird, although I prefer wheels to wings. My friend Elaine and I left last Thursday for Portland. This was the temperature that morning:

The butternut squash plants sustained a bit of frostbite, but everything else survived.

The reason for our trip was a church meeting. Our Mennonite denomination is organized into regional conferences, and the Pacific Northwest Mennonite Conference—PNMC for short—holds an annual meeting every June. Elaine grew up in Montana but is retired from pastoring a church in the Central Plains conference. She and I traveled to Boise for the 2018 PNMC meeting. No doubt we would have traveled to every meeting since then had the pandemic not forced their cancellation. Elaine is one of my favorite traveling companions, especially to church events.

I don’t take simple vacations. I hatched a plan for this one, too. Elaine’s sister Alice lives in Seattle, so I suggested that after the PNMC meeting, we drive to Seattle and spend a few days there. Initially, we thought the PNMC meeting would take place over two days, as it always has in the past. I made reservations at an Airbnb outside Portland for myself, Elaine, and Libbie, who also planned to join us. (Libbie drove over on Friday.) As it turned out, the organizers planned an abbreviated meeting for Saturday only, which left Elaine and me a bit at loose ends on Friday. She was more than willing to accompany me on a fabric shopping expedition, though.

Elaine knits (and crochets). Our first stop on Friday was at a Joann Fabrics, where she scored a nice haul of yarn on the clearance rack. I bought three packages of purse hardware.

We left Joanns and headed to The Mill End Store.

I’ve been to this store a couple of times and it never disappoints. I came away with a length of red rayon ponte for a pair of Renee pants and a turquoise blue sweater knit for a Toaster Sweater. (Joann Fabrics, are you paying attention?)

JC Briar had suggested that we try lunch at Bob’s Red Mill, whose headquarters is nearby.

We enjoyed some delicious food outside on the patio—the weather was stellar—and I bought a couple of bags of gluten-free granola.

That was enough shopping for the day. We went back to the Airbnb to wait for Libbie and rest up. Elaine’s nephew and his wife live in Portland and had invited us to dinner. We also had a spinning wheel to deliver. Jeff’s wife, Portia, found one in Laurel, Montana, over by Billings, and through the combined efforts of a large extended family, we were able to get it from Billings to Portland. I raided my spinning fiber stash before we left and took a bunch of sample bags of fiber along for Portia to play with. Dinner was delicious and the company delightful.

Libbie, Elaine, and I headed to Portland Mennonite Church early on Saturday morning. Our transitional pastor, Miriam, had come to Portland with her family and met us there. I have missed these gatherings so much. I served a four-year term on the board of directors and got to know some of these people very well. Seeing them in person again was wonderful. We made new friends, too. The husband-and-wife pastor team at Menno Mennonite, in Ritzville—where the relief sale is held every October—sat in front of us at the meeting and we had a good time visiting with them.

The meeting ended at 5 and Elaine and I hit the road shortly thereafter. It’s about a three-hour drive from Portland to Seattle. We rolled in around 8:30 pm. Elaine’s sister, Alice, met us at my Airbnb and whisked Elaine off to stay with her until Tuesday morning.

DD#2 and I spent Sunday doing some shopping. She needed a few things from Ikea for her new apartment. I love to wander around Ikea. She had to work Monday, so I spent the day visiting Joanns, Hobby Lobby, Half-Price Books, and the Liz Claiborne department at JC Penney. I desperately needed a few summer dresses and nice pants to wear to church and I scored big on this trip.

Elaine and I left Seattle Tuesday morning and headed home. We stopped at a Joann Fabrics in Spokane where we raided the clearance rack again and bought yarn for a few more prayer shawls. All in all, it was a lovely and uneventful trip.

I dashed into town yesterday morning to retrieve my computer. I took it in the day before we left to have the operating system—woefully five years out of date because of some bizarre incompatibility—updated. I knew what needed to be done and probably could have done it myself, but I preferred to pay an expert to do it in case something went wrong. They had to back it up, wipe the drive, install the new system, and restore the backup, but now I have a zippy and functional computer again.