The long road home before the long road away

This last week has both been stressful and rewarding. My mother came down to San Jose to help me pack and sell my worldly possessions. I had a 3 day moving sale from an apartment--not a small task. I was constantly on Craig's List posting and updating posts so that I could attract attention to get people to come to my place. All in all I did pretty well. I sold everything but a 3 piece cabinet set and my coffee table. Those pieces are now in Kevin's storage unit.

After that it was a whirlwind of errands: Bank, Diveshop, Walgreens, Doctor appt., Work, Goodwill,...

On Friday night I was blessed to have good dive friends throw me one last party. It is sad to be leaving such great people but I know it is temporary and I know they will come to visit me in Thailand. Thank you again Kevin and Jo for the great food and wonderful place to gather.

The final chore was to clean the apartment enough to say I tried. We left San Jose at 11:20am and made it into Ashland, Oregon at around 5:30pm. That's pretty good time and it actually went pretty fast with my Mom and me taking 2 hour driving shifts.

We hit the road exactly as planned on Sunday morning at 8am and ending up stopping in Woodburn Outlets for lunch and little tax-free shopping at 12:30. After that we hit a chunk of traffic through Portland and another larger chunk in Tacoma. Not sure why the latter stretch had traffic around 5pm on a Sunday but we still rolled into Mercer Island at about 5:45pm. Surprisingly my gas light indicator hasn't turned on yet. We filled up in Medford about 460 miles ago. I guess I'll miss my Camry as well but it will be here when I return. It will be nice to not have to thinking about driving or filling the gas or other car tasks for a year.

Now I have to concentrate on one main thing: relax before I go while spending time with friends and family up in Seattle. I have a couple small errands to run up here but that won't distract me from the former task.

Back down to San Jose on the 25th for a flight to Thailand on the 28th out of SFO.