Loose grip

I did 90% of the planning for this vacation, all of the logistics (where to overall, flights, lodging, car, etc.). Natalie did the rest of it, looking into what we should do when we were in the places we were going to.

So my goal for this trip was to try to maintain a loose grip, to just drive the car and help get us from place to place, from attraction to attraction, and otherwise just enjoy the ride.  I am discovering, however, that that is more easily said than done, because I have something of a control tendency.

Yesterday, for example, while driving through the North Cascades on Route 20 (gorgeous, do it!), we had to figure out where to stop to hike.  Although Mary and Natalie had been doing the reading about where to hike, they weren't sufficiently decisive for my tastes, and I got crabby and pissy.  Our car was a smorgasbord of rainjackets we haven't needed, bottles of water, bags of quickly browning bananas and other snacks, and maps of various granularities.  And I was pressing for the right map, and getting a little short with my ladies. Graham, of course, just wanted to get to the hotel so he could read books and play on his iPod.

Then this morning, I woke up before Mary, and took on the epic quest of figuring out how to get us breakfast without spending $50, while making use of the fact that we have a cabin (here in Winthrop, WA) with a kitchen and a dining room table, so we can skip restaurants for all three meals today.  I did figure this out, but not without heading into town and getting a little bit bossy and crabby with various baristas (one of them was out of breakfast sandwiches, in the other, another didn't know what kind of bread the pre-wrapped $4.75 sandwiches were on).  All told, I kind of acted as a poor ambassador for the East Coast. Though I did speak Russian with a Ukrainian barista, and even apologized for having to use Russian rather than Ukrainian, so I get a gold star for that.

Now, I am sitting on my deck looking out over the Methow River, enjoying the cool morning breeze, wondering what these itsy-bitsy birds are diving for.  Must be insects of some sort.