Now in Portland, OR

We are presently driving up Highway I-5 from near Eugene, Oregon to Portland, Oregon. At the moment, we are 4951 miles since leaving Houston.

We are in the land of 65 deg weather, drive through Espresso Bars, semi trucks pulling three trailers and lots of trees and fields of crops, vineyards and much more fertility than we’ve seen for most of the trip. They have had too much rain here, not too little.

The GPS navigation that we have is a wonderful help, if being amazingly wrong about 5% of the time is acceptable. We are using a hand-held Garmin GPSmap60cx connected to Garmin “nRoute” software on our laptop. The low end Garmin GPS for cars that friends let Dave use when in Seattle was MUCH better, but certainly not perfect. Dave is hard to please.

The combination that we are using now does not know left from right (She often tells us to get into the right lane, but the exit arrives on the left side, etc.) and the new maps that we bought at great expense and went to a lot of bother to get unlocked are NOT unlocked. So our maps are over 6 years old, and so on. It seems to be NOT ready for prime time. Grumble, grumble.

Dave will try to call them again and get things better.

He will also try to give them credit if they fix it, so stay tuned. A friend let him try Delorme’s similar GPS software which would get us there, but since Dave did not have time to learn how it worked, it was not very impressive. It made the Garmin seem not so bad actually. Perhaps Brilliant! But, much of that was probably operator error on Dave’s part.

We just left Janet’s first cousin, once removed (I think that is the relationship.). She and her husband are managing two small sharing gardens that are excellent! Please try this link:
http://alpinegarden.blogspot.com/2010/02/monroes-own-food-sharing-garden.html

Our boating friends from near Morro Bay, CA are doing a vaguely similar thing at this link:
http://carrizolavender.com/ and this one:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Carrizo-Lavender-Farm/149779591711809

“May the Force be with them!”

Janet pointed out that our friends seem to all be really enjoying what they do, even though we have friends doing just about everything that you can imagine. I’d certainly agree.

Sadly a few of them have out doing what they love and not at home as we passed by. But, since we seldom could give them proper notice, we understand.

Perhaps the most distant are in Western Somoa, on their way west, as I write this. We went by their hometown of Nogales, AZ in our travels. However, as I think about it, our Southern California friends that are in Finike, Turkey, on their boat and looking in on Alegría frequently would be even further.

Dave & Janet
Now in Portland

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