Day 1 -- Mill Creek to Richland

Or, from Bummer to Bombers....

So what's that about Bombers and Bad Haircuts, anyway???

Why is it that every big trip has to start with at least one gigantic SNAFU?

Several days before we left, and after long consideration, hours of web surfing, and talking to owners of such gizmos, I ordered a Garmin NUVI 360 from Amazon.com. A few days before that I also ordered a few CD's that I thought would be nice travelin' music and a book on my latest interest, mySQL. For that order I chose their free delivery option as I had noticed that "my stuff" almost always arrived in 2 to 3 days to my location just North of Seattle. Hah. Not this time. That package finally arrived 4 days after we left. I sure hope our neighbor snags it off our porch before it grows legs and walks off. As for the NUVI 360, that situation was even worse. That represents a sizable chunk of coin, so it requires a signature. I left a note for the delivery service, UPS (What has brown done to you today?), saying that he could get either one of two neighbors to sign for it, or I could pick it up from the Redmond center later in the evening. He left a note that it would be back at the depot at 6:50. <sigh> He never contacted either neighbor, each just a 30 second walk away. So off I go to Redmond, a 20 mile drive, on Marilyn's birthday, on a Friday night, to stand in line for my package. The upshot is that the dweeb driver just off-loaded everything back into the system, and it had gone into the giant maw of a 40-foot trailer, not to see the light of day until they started to prepare for deliveries at 0200 Monday! But finding out the bitter truth took well over an hour, and the whole fruitless trip stole over three hours and left me in the dog house for spoiling Marilyn's birthday. Now to be fair, if I had read the fine print on the back of the slip with the dimwit driver's note, I would have seen that I should have called their toll-free number and maybe their magic system would have slapped the driver upside the head before he tossed it on the conveyor, but I didn't, and no dope-slap was administered, and so we would go without a nav unit. Oh well -- we will be money ahead, and paper maps previously obtained from AAA, which I have been a member of since I was 16, have always proved sufficient. Amazon.com, however, will not get any more of my business for some time. Oh, and UPS? I stopped using their sorry asses years ago, and I wish Amazon would, as well. I favor FedEx, ground for most holiday package sending, and air when necessary.

Well, Saturday morning was spent licking my wounds from the deserved talking-to's I received, packing the car, and tying off as many loose ends as I could in the time remaining. We planned on stopping for the night at Marilyn's brother's house in Richland -- they grew up there and are proud "Bomber" alumni, having attended probably the only High School in the world that used to trot a replica of an Atom Bomb out for their football games :-) Even though the school board hates it, the High School still has their mascot name proudly emblazoned on the side. Here's a link showing a few pictures: http://richlandbombers.org/ Just hover over the picture below the site banner.

Now about the Bad Haircut. You see, Marilyn's sister-in-law runs the hair salon that made the news last year when a patron held up the shop for $100. Every link to a news story about this incident repeats the same erroneous information which was obtained from the officer who responded -- that officer jumped to a conclusion and the rest is history, and has become part of the national, maybe world, folklore. Since there is no sense trying to fight that kind of inertia with the truth, I am not even going to try. I will only say that the story is much more complex, has absolutely nothing to do about a haircut, bad or otherwise, involves a personal tragedy for the woman who committed the crime, and is not nearly as news worthy as the erroneous version: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E1DD1431F931A15757C0A9639C8B63

Richland is less than fours away from our starting point in Mill Creek, and by the time we got there, we had patched things up, the nav unit was forgotten, and a good BBQ'd salmon dinner, and lots of wine and laughter around the outdoor dinner table made it seem that perhaps we were on vacation, after all.