Now that we are retired and traveling, I am surprised that we can be distracted from unfettered fooling around by nearly mindless tasks. Today we took on our poorly archived postcard collection. During our travels, when we get to a national park or monument or other culturally or visually appealing place, we look for postcards of the sight. Some are merely photographs while others are prints of paintings of outstanding features, like Half Dome at Yosemite.
Having been on the road for 3 years, the collection had grown to be quite voluminous. What the collection did not have was dates of purchase so we had to figure out what month and year we bought the postcards. That took a while. Then we actually put the postcards in chronological order so viewers could see a short visual summary of each year’s circuit.
In late 2014, we took a spin from San Diego to the Pacific Northwest, returning home in November. In January, 2015, we drove across the country from San Diego to Florida and then north to Maine, then to Ohio and Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado and Arizona before returning to San Diego in November. In early 2016, we went north to Washington before turning east into the Great Basin with stops in Washington, California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada and Montana before returning to San Diego in October. In November 2016 we left San Diego again but only made it as far as Las Vegas before returning home before Xmas. On December 28, we left San Diego again and took a four month trip to warm and toasty Texas before returning through New Mexico and Arizona for our son’s wedding in April. A few days later we hit the road again and have been going north up the I-5 corridor through California, Oregon and Washington, carefully driving miles out of the way to avoid large cities.
All along the way during these trips, we purchased interesting (to us) postcards but our archiving system consisted of mostly throwing the cards in a box. Now, after today’s efforts, we have sorted our stock and put the collated piles into little brown bags and then Peggy put ’em somewhere.
This clearly important task having been completed, we decided to go fool around. We hopped into Charlotte and took a spin through the vividly green country to the southwest of Olympia, the state capitol. We took WA-12 west to WA-8 west to US-101 south to I-5 south to complete our loop. It is nice country but there is nothing remarkable here other than the colors of the ubiquitous vegetation, many beautiful ranch houses, some fruit stands and large second-growth forests. It is pretty evident the folks in this part of the world consider trees a crop and large stands of reforestation of various heights clearly show how long since the last logging occurred. It is still a very nice drive although I would not come from miles away to do it.
There are pix. Click here