"The mountains are calling and I must go." John Muir

Today I am writing from deep within a canyon, outside of Pomeroy, Washington. After an 8 hour drive from my in laws, we arrived at the Last Resort campground. Could there be a better choice for the name? Nah. The drive here was incredible. Whenever we move to a new place, I am completely amazed at the beautiful scenery that keeps spilling out with every mile. The mountains here are so massive I feel like a little pebble at the base of them. There are deer EVERYWHERE. As well as wild turkeys, pheasants and quail. I feel like I have entered Marty Stouffer’s Wild America.

With every move we make, it seems like inadvertently something terrible/hilarious happens. Well not every time, but there seems to be a theme. We are about ten miles out of town and to get there you have to travel a well maintained, but definitely gravel and steep road. Did I mention there are a lot of deer? WHACK. One less deer in this glorious landscape. Hit on the right side and went right under and out the back of the truck. Poor thing. I know it did see the light, our brights were on. Once it was safe to stop we saw there was no damage to the truck. Unknown to us the deer had done damage to the underside of the truck and about five hours later, on a trip back up the gravel road, we felt the truck dragging something. No it wasn’t the deer, that would be mortifying. It was our 7 foot exhaust pipe.  This is that moment where you have to make a choice. You choose to laugh or  choose to cry and throw yourself off the side of the canyon. We laughed, but that was later. At this point it is pitch black outside, my husband is laying on the ground trying to un-wedge the hunk of metal from its resting place between other hunks of metal. He says, grab a flashlight. I say we don’t have one. He says, find something. I find a 10 million candlepower spotlight. So not only is he trying not to asphyxiate from the exhaust,  I am blinding him with ray of light so bright I could possibly be seen from the moon. With hard work and my help, he lifts the pipe off the ground and throws it into the back. Now we start laughing. The next day he comes home after work and tells me I need to take the truck into town the next day to get the screw out of the back tire. This time the laughter takes a bit longer to surface. These things are inconveniences, but they do make me thankful. Thankful the deer didn’t take a journey through the windshield or that the screw didn’t insert itself into the tire and cause a flat on Ryan’s way to work. But I am well aware of the THEME that seems to be happening with each move, and would be perfectly fine if my awareness ended with the tire.

Now I am off to go walk the hills with these furballs. xoxo