Our wonderful road trip to Puerto Vallarta! - Marge

What was left after the cargo carrier was amputated

Otto sleeping

Highway in Mexico

We arrived in Puerto Vallarta one week ago today! Drove 10 days in our little Hyundai hatchback to get here (with a 3 day stop in LA to see Brian, Gwen and granddaughter Charlotte). Over 2,800 miles! We filled boxes as fast as we could on our last day, way behind schedule! Having no idea the final bit of packing and storing would take so long! Finally throwing things into the car, the storage unit or the cargo carrier mounted on the roof rack almost randomly so we could get done and go. Didn’t drive out of the condo parking lot until 5;30 in the afternoon. Getting dark. Exhausted before we even started. Had to stop at my soon-to-be former job in Tumwater to drop off things and say a few more good-byes. Then finally on to Salem (yes, not very far!) where we arrived at 1:30 AM too tired to take our suitcases or anything else out of the cargo carrier on the roof rack or to take almost anything out of the car. We dragged ourselves into the motel and fell down onto the bed and slept in our clothes. The next morning, I went outside (before coffee!) to check on the car. Astonishingly, the cargo carrier had not even survived one night of travel before being amputated right off the roof rack! It was gone! All that was left were the cords, dangling down the sides of the car! Our first night! We had hardly started and already suffered a setback! We lost two suitcases, containing all our clothes for the trip, and Otto’s dog bed and a couple of pillows and a lot of my money collages which were all digital and can be replaced and many of Janice’s magnificent ink and watercolor drawings of which there are no copies so they are gone for good. Very, very sorry Janice for losing those wonderful pictures!! Astonishingly, the car itself, crammed full of just about everything we owned, hadn’t been broken into! And, strangely, I actually felt a little feeling of relief that we had less stuff to carry around with us (other than Janice’s pictures of course!!). That was the lowest point of our trip. After that, every evening when we arrived at a motel we unloaded almost everything and put it all back in the car the next morning. Every day we organized better and figured out how to make traveling easier and became more confident and enjoyed ourselves more. And each day we got farther and farther from all the places we knew and our old well-worn everyday lives and were more and more out in the open world, with the beautiful scenery, different every day, and the future out in front somewhere almost too far away to imagine. It was a wonderful trip. Wonderful to cross the border into Mexico (we weren’t even stopped—just waved through) and to drive three days through Mexico without experiencing any problems or issues of any kind other than almost destroying the car’s suspension numerous times when unexpectedly driving over enormous speed bumps (called topes--a very popular traffic control device in Mexico) and it was especially wonderful to arrive in Puerto Vallarta at last (thanks to Google, our guide all the way)!