Not According to Plan

Here it is, less than a week remaining until Christmas, and I haven't even recorded our experiences from the Thanksgiving trip yet. Got to fix that.

Note: This is one of those long, potentially boring travelogue entries that shows up here from time to time. Be warned. -M

Road trips are always interesting. You plan and prepare and try allow for unusual events and unexpected happenings, but in the end, it's all pretty much a crapshoot. This Thanksgiving weekend, we came up snake eyes.

First, a bit of pre-trip information. My one surviving grandmother (my mother's mother, or "Granny") is getting on in years. She's 88 now. Granted, her mother died in 1998 at the age of 102, so genetically, there's every reason to believe she's still got some time left. Unfortunately, she's been developing Alzheimer's Disease. A couple of months ago, the decision was made to place her in an assisted living center. It's a nice enough place, and they allow her to keep her dog there with her.

With her move to the home, the question arose about what to do with her car, a 1990 Dodge Dynasty. The decision makers decided they'd offer it to us. So part of the Thanksgiving trip, in addition to seeing the whole famn damily and enjoying a little time away from it all, was going to involve picking up the car and driving it back from Montana to Utah.

In the weeks leading up to the trip, we tried to keep in contact with everyone about the status of the car and figure out how we were going to get up there. We considered flying, but that was prohibitively expensive. We considered driving the Dreadnought up and towing the other car back with it, but rental of a towing apparatus was more expensive than gas would have been just to drive the car back separately. We thought about driving Nancy's car up and driving both cars back, but neither of us was particularly excited about driving the entire way back in separate cars.

So we (meaning I) came up with the brilliant idea to rent a car to get us there and to drive the Dynasty back together. Nancy was a little skeptical about this idea (as was I, but not as much) because we weren't getting a lot of solid information back on the condition of the car or what had been done to get it roadworthy after sitting in Granny's garage for several months. So I talked to Dad about getting a one-way rental and the odds of actually being able to get the Dynasty back successfully. He said he thought it was worth taking the chance. So I took the leap of faith and booked a rental from SLC to Bozeman.

Wednesday

Wednesday morning came around, Nancy went to her half-day of work, and I took a bus to the airport to pick up the rental car. Avis gave us a Ford Taurus, which was fairly roomy and had a CD changer. I got back home and started to pack. Nancy arrived shortly thereafter and we got everything organized and into the car. We hit the road at exactly 3:00 p.m.

The first hour of the trip was a joke. We had traffic delays pretty much all the way through Sale Lake and up into Ogden. The roads were dry and there were no accidents that I could see, but traffic was still slow. We made it 47 miles in the first hour of our trip—on the Interstate. I don't recall ever seeing so many people driving so slowly for no readily apparent reason in my life.

Once we got past Ogden, though, we started to make good time. By 5:00 p.m. we were up to 120 miles, so we'd managed to pull our average up to 60 MPH. (Do the math, it's not that hard.) It was starting to get dark by the, but with good road conditions in our favor, it wasn't a big deal. We got to Idaho Falls around 6:30 and took a bathroom break, grabbed a couple of beverages, and topped off the gas tank. Then, with Nancy driving and me making sandwiches with the supplies we'd brought, we were back on the road. We got through Island Park, a beautiful 20-mile stretch of northeastern Idaho where the speed limit changes every few miles from 65 to 45 and back again. The turn to Idaho 287 snuck up on us and we nearly missed it, which would have landed us in West Yellowstone. But we saw the sign in time, made the turn, and before we knew it, we were crossing into Montana. We made it past Ennis and Norris and into Harrison, where we turned left onto the Pony road. We pulled up next to the Pony Cabin at almost exactly 10:00 p.m. 418 miles in 7 hours flat. Not bad.

We were greeted by my brother Sam, cousin Dan, and the smell of smoke. It seems the two of them had had some difficulty with the old wood burning kitchen stove in the cabin, the main difficulty being that they had tried to build the fire in the water compartment. So we greeted each other while arrangements were made to air out the cabin (no small issue, considering how cold the outside air in a Montana mountain town tends to be in late November). After resolving that issue we sat down with Dan, Sam, Sam's sig. ot. Kendra, and my niece Mikayla and played Cranium and card games until about one in the morning. Thus began our Thanksgiving vacation.

Thursday

Thursday morning began with a trip to Bozeman to return the rental car. We were supposed to return the car by 10:00 Thanksgiving morning. So, after getting up and having a bit of breakfast, Nancy and I followed Dad out of Pony into Harrison, back to Norris, and thence along the mountain road into Bozeman. It started to snow as we approached Bozeman, and the roads got a little slick. The rental car's windshield wipers, which we hadn't needed to use the previous day, turned out to be less than impressive. Nevertheless, after a brief, cold, and snowy stop to top off the tank, we made it to the rental car area at Gallatin Field just a bit after 10:00.

I couldn't find the Avis counter.

Dad couldn't find it either, so we asked the friendly folks at one of the other counters. They told us the reason we couldn't find Avis was because they weren't there. They were off-site, about a mile down the road leading into the airport. So we saddled back up and made our way to the Avis office. They weren't concerned that we didn't make the 10:00 deadline, which was cool. I didn't have the rental agreement with me when we returned the car—it was in one of my 'carry on' bags back in Pony—but they weren't concerned with that, either. They took down my information and thanked me for my business. Mission accomplished.

From there we went to pick up Granny for the day's festivities. Dad drove us to the center where she lives and we went up to her room to get her. She called out to us when we rang her bell but didn't come to the door. So I went to find someone who could let us in. The lady back at the front desk arranged to have someone meet us at her door. Moments later, we were in and talking to Granny.

I should mention here that I'd been growing a goatee since UEA weekend (October 12th or thereabouts). It had become nice and full, albeit a little more grey than I'd prefer. And it had itched for several days at one point. But by T-day I was used to it. Imagine my surprise when Granny didn't recognize me. I was speechless; Dad had to tell her who I was. Alzheimer's or not, that shook me up a little. I shaved it off the following morning.

Nancy helped Granny pick out and put on a nice outfit. Then we headed back to Pony. Once we got there, Granny said hello to everyone and socialized for about half an hour. After that she said she was feeling tired and wanted to lie down. We didn't see much of her for the rest of the day.

I reflect on this, knowing that it's entirely likely that this was the last time I'll see Granny in this world. When she checked into the assisted care home they ran her through a complete physical. She had fought leukemia for the last five years or so—something I didn't know about until just recently. She'd been in remission, but the physical showed that she had started to relapse. And if that weren't enough, they also found a lump one of her breasts. The adults were talking about all of this afterwards. Aunt Anne and Dad kind of summed it all up: she'll probably make it until Christmas, but it'll be a miracle if she makes it to Easter.

I could write an entire post about Granny, and probably will, one day. It's not like I see her a lot, or that we talk on the phone every week, or anything like that. Truth be told, I don't keep in touch with any of my relatives outside my parents and brothers as much as I should. But Granny is different. Se introduced me to the LDS Church, which has changed everything in my life since. And she's my last remaining grandparent (well, except for step-grandma Dorothy, who I haven't seen in years). So it's sobering knowing she won't be here for very much longer. Of course, We were supposed to lose her a few years ago when she was hospitalized for a lung condition, and she obviously survived. So you never know. But something tells me we won't get the happy ending this time around.

I guess that's as good a place as any to take a break in the narrative. I'll pick things up with Friday morning in my next post. Yes, there's more. -M