(written October 17th from notes taken previously)
Well, remember how we crossed our fingers and hoped we weren’t going to be bothered at the Love’s Travel Stop?
Yeah…
So there was this security guard that kind of looked a little sketchy Dad that my mom noticed before we went to bed, and come about, oh… Three or four in the morning, he knocked super hard on the window and kicked us out.
Funny thing was, there was a lady sleeping in her car right next to us, and he didn’t say boo to her. She was there when we arrived, and she was there when we drove away, and he had already walked away back into the store.
🤔
My mom didn’t wake up during the kickout process, and I hoped to find another place to sleep without her waking up, but the speed bumps in the Love’s parking lot were so large that it shook her awake before I even got out of the parking lot.
Being in the middle of suburbia without any of our normal safe landing spots, I figured my best option was going to be to find an LDS church and camp out in the parking lot.
For reasons quite understandable, cities and suburbia are generally non-hospitable places for people who are wanting to sleep in their cars.
It was about a 30-minute drive, or so, from the Travel Stop to the nearest LDS church. I had thought it was only like 10 minutes, but Google pulled up a different church when I searched for LDS churches, so when I got underway, I thought it was just going to be a short drive, but it turned out to be much longer.
But that was okay, we made it over to the church parking lot, and though the parking lot itself, like most other places, was not hospitable to people parking on it overnight, we were able to park on the street in front of it without any issues.
So I got the van situated on the side of the road there and crawled back into bed to hopefully get a little bit more sleep before waking up for the day.
…
We woke up from there without any further disturbances, gratefully, and then headed over to my sister Leslie’s place. On our way over, we got the message that she was actually out running errands and wouldn’t be back for another couple of hours, so we stopped over at a Chase Bank near where she lives, in order to pull out some cash in preparation for our Future camping trips. We didn’t want to find ourselves without the right bills like we did last time.
Not being used to the Seattle exits and traffic and everything else, I managed to miss two exits in my attempts to get where we were going, which was pretty annoying.
I despise cities. But y’all already know that.
🙃
Once we got to Leslie’s, my mom went inside to wait for Leslie and Mark to get home, and I grabbed my hair clippers to trim my beard, as I was starting to look a little more bushy than I prefer.
We also ate a little bit of food because it was well into lunch time, and we had told Leslie we were going to show up having been fed, but we didn’t realize that she wasn’t going to be there when we got there, so it was later than we expected, so we ate again. 🙃
It wasn’t too long before Leslie and Mark came walking up, Aunt I put my things away, and went inside, and we all sat down and started chatting.
We talked a little bit about our travels on this most recent trip, and we talked about Leslie and Mark’s recent travels, as they’ve been doing a fair bit of international travel lately.
During our conversations, Leslie mentioned some of the experiences she’s had with bath houses in other countries and mentioned that there was a local Korean bath house nearby. She and my mom ended up going out To the local Korean bath house, and Mark and I stayed and talked about Canada and traveling through Canada and what not and lots and lots of other things as well.
Great conversation. I’ve never spent that much time, ever, chatting with Mark in one stretch.
He also made one heck of a good dinner, and my niece popped in as well, so I got to visit with her and see how she’s doing. Good to be there. Good to catch up with everything.
My mom and sister got back from the bath house around dinner time. We had already been eating a bit when they got back, I think, and we all sat around and talked about their experience and lots of other experiences and life things.
By then it was starting to get a little late, and party started breaking up a bit. Corinne left to go study, and Mark headed for bed.
My sister, mom and myself kept talking for a decent little while after the others had left, talking about a broad range of different things before the conversation ended and we all went our separate ways.
As per usual, I stayed out in Rover, and my mom stayed in the house.
I stayed up a good while before finally closing my eyes, just thinking and winding myself down.
Lots and lots on my mind.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 