Lists

I tried once before to do a blog.  Actually, I set it up for my offspring, but by then school had started and homework took over.  So I occasionally posted a trivial bit.  But life was too hectic.  Isn't it always!  When I decided to try and pick it up again, I discovered that the note with the offspring's convoluted password that I could never remember had disappeared.  Yes, I know you are not supposed to write passwords down.  But just call me "Dory"!  Short term memory disappeared about 2 years ago.  If I don't write it down, I don't remember it.  Period.  Zilch, nada, nothing.  I wonder how I function sometimes, but I am my lists.  Stacks of them.  Some are ten years old but still valid.  No bucket list, though.  Although, if I did have a bucket list, seeing Yellowstone National Park would have been on it.   I am happy to say that if I had such a list, that would be get crossed off now. 

Yes, we took a real vacation.  Not that visiting family is not a vacation.  Anything that gets me away from the house and my piles of lists and projects and have-to-do's qualifies as a vacation.  But we did the whole road trip, see the sights along the way (although not as many as I would liked), savor the moments vacation!  We only do that about every 3-4 years because of schedules and finances and needing to see family.  What's more, we did not run into any problems.  We came back driving the same car we left home in.

I must admit that I did not expect to have those ooh-and-ahh moments in Yellowstone because I expected crowds to be everywhere.  (And I am an introvert in how I get my energy.  Crowds suck the life out of me.  I much prefer small groups.  Once a group hits 7 or 8, it's big.  Not that I can't enjoy a bigger group, I am just exhausted afterwards.  So shopping at a mall?  Dementor city!)  But the only place we felt the crowds were overwhelming were in the Old Faithful area.  Now, really people, Old Faithful is big and reliable, but it is not, in my humble opinion, the best feature of the park.  I loved the colors of the hot springs, the plopping of the mudpots, the variety of columns in the biofilms (don't ask....it's a geeky science thing).  So Grand Prismatic Spring and Dragon's Mouth Spring and the Anemone Geyser get my votes for favorite spots.  And listening to the bison grunt and snort was totally awesome.  I could just picture the hills covered with the huge herds of long ago.  While our time in Yellowstone was short (four days/three nights), it was a wonderful experience.  One I hope the offspring will long remember.

Perhaps the other thing that made this trip so special is that I got to see two of the best friends one could ask for.  Neither friend lives anywhere close to us, but I still consider them among my best friends.  One friend we stopped to visit along the way (I planned our route so we could do that), but could not stay even remotely as long as we would have liked (thanks to a late start due to a broken irrigation line).  The other friend drove all the way from Billings with her husband just to spend time with us.  This friend #2?  I had not seen since 1987!  In minutes the years fell away and we were enjoying our time together as we always had.  It could have been awkward since we married since we last saw each other.  And one can easily run out of things to talk about.  No.  The men got along, the offspring took to them quickly, there were no awkward moments of "what shall we talk about now?", and I was mentally planning the next visit as we said goodbye.

Maybe we will have to do this vacation thing again.  I guess we were just gun shy after the last trip resulted in a series of events that they base movies on.  And that's good.  We couldn't afford both a new roof and a new car this time around.