Day One -- Our Chariot!

We spent months planning our trip to the Pacific Northwest, a part of God’s creation that neither of us had ever explored.  The one reoccurring problem that kept frustrating us was transportation once we arrived.  How were we to travel from place to place once we got off the plane?  I had checked the option of renting a car but that was going to cost close to $2,000 for a five week rental.  Trains and buses just did not go everywhere that we wanted to travel.  One night when I was tired of banging my head against the wall, Ilene reminded me that we planned on buying a car later in the year.  “So, what is keeping us from buying it in Seattle,” she asked.  It sounded like a great solution but I told her that she would have to find a dealer and work out the deal.  She accepted the challenge and before you know it there were e-mails flying back and forth from a sales manager in Kirkland, WA who promised that he could get the exact car that we wanted and have it waiting for us when we arrived.  Well, it did not go quite as smoothly as we had hoped.  Because we were traveling into Canada and staying on military bases we needed to take our North Carolina plates with us.  Temporary tags would not suffice.  With just 24 hours to spare before boarding our plane to Seattle, the Fed Ex envelope arrived with all the paper work we needed to get our permanent tags from NCDOT.

After a very long flight we arrived at our motel in Seattle.  The plan was for the dealer to pick us up there and then drive us to the dealership where we would put on our tags and get a crash course in how to use the on board computer and GPS system.  The next morning we got dressed, had breakfast and right on schedule the dealer pulled into the parking lot driving our car.  It was only at that point, that I could let go of all the anxiety that centered around transportation.  I knew that now Ilene and I had some control of our own destiny.  Let the sabbatical begin!  Yeah!!!!