It’s good to be home again. Yes, we’ve been home for over a week; and yes, I haven’t told you anything about the rest of the Month On The Road Trip; but, yeah. Here we are.
Vancouver continued to be delightful. We walked a lot, and figured out the transit, and even figured out the driving-around. We figured out that sushi there is AMAZING and CHEAP. And we figured out that nothing else there is cheap. 🙂 We had some superb meals (and great visits) with Camille and Claude, and ate waaaayyyyy too much baklava one evening.
And then it was time to leave! We took the car ferry from Vancouver to Victoria Island–
and met another ferry along the way*
–and spent a few hours at the amazing Butchart Gardens. Which made us feel simultaneously inspired and inadequate about our own garden. 🙂
From there, another ferry to Port Angeles, across VERY choppy water…I was wondering if my stomach was going to stay put, and also if the cars would all be tumbled together when we got back to them. Fortunately, the answers to those questions were yes and no, respectively, though it was touch and go for a while–on both matters, I think.
Then a drive from Port Angeles to Port Townsend, and the RandyCon writer’s retreat–by which point Mark was feeling like the cold he’d had on Orcas Island was returning. So he went to bed…and stayed there the entire retreat. Literally. I brought him food, and there were people attending the retreat he never laid eyes on. 🙁
By the time we finally got home to Portland, four days later, he was still so sick, I took him to the doctor the next morning. She diagnosed kind of an allergy-attack-out-of-control, plus a virus, and prescribed steroids. Which worked like MAGIC. He’s almost done with his course of them (tapering down–half a pill now), and has been feeling just great since about fifteen minutes after the first dose. Fingers crossed that his immune system picks up where the steroids leave off!
Other than that, since we got home–busy busy. Mark has several super-secret exciting and cool freelance jobs, which all arrived on the scene either moments before we left on the trip or during the trip; he’s been trying to shuffle them all, working ten-hour days, and we look forward to telling you about all of them all in good time. I have had the usual happy flurry of freelance work, and have been working hard on the rewrite of Queen & Tower (got lots of good work done at RandyCon); but then just this week was interrupted by something else, which I think I will tell you about in a subsequent post, because this is quite enough information for one long overdue blog post, I think!
Oh but let me not neglect to mention the garden.
We were surprised and pleased to find that all was not in entire shambles after being neglected for a month–an unexpectedly springlike month. Yes, there are lots of weeds, and pernicious vines, and all that; but actually, things were in pretty good shape.
Which doesn’t mean that we didn’t have to go out and buy a jillion new plants, and start putting them in the ground, and in pots. And I will also show you pictures of that later, when we are more done, and I have actually taken photos. 🙂
Let’s see…oh, there is one more piece of major news: new nephew JJ was sprung from the neonatal ICU after 42 days of captivity (which is still pretty amazing, considering he arrived on the scene something like 60 days early). He’s home and doing great:
And we are still looking forward to meeting him in July! If he isn’t off to college by then.
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*And saw a pod of orcas! At last! But I didn’t get a photo, I was too busy looking at them.