First Road Trip of the Summer

Hi everyone,

First off, Happy 4th of July to you!

Are you all ready? You are about to enter the picture overload zone. As any of you who gets out and about knows, you can never capture the true beauty of nature through the lens of a camera, unless you are a national geographic photographer or something, but anyway . . . we headed out to Glacier National Park for our first road trip of the summer.

Wait, wait, wait, let me back up a second. It may not be time for picture overload yet. Before we got to Glacier we made a quick stop in Spokane to spend a few days with Grandpa and Nana. We were there over Mom's birthday so we ended up going out to Green Acres to buy her loose leaf tea that she has been waiting for the past 6 months to get. Then we ate dinner by the falls.

It was the next morning that was the real kicker. Many of you may already know this, but for those of you who don't, sometime during the night the back of our truck was broken into. When I say broken into it really wasn't broken into because we don't have a canopy or anything, but our tie down straps and bungees were all cut away and almost all of our camping gear (really our lives for 10 days) was stolen. We had 10 out of 11 rubbermaids stolen. The only rubbermaid left was Dad's clothes and shoes. Well, that and our big contico with our goose down comforter and pillows and the other big contico with all our bike stuff, and our bikes and bike trailer were still there too. I think they didn't take the bikes because they were either too loud to get out of the truck or they didn't have enough time. I mean, why would they have left Dad's rubbermaid when they took all the others. They probably got spooked by something.

You can imagine that we were just a bit upset and a bit in shock. We called the police but they don't send anyone for something like that. We started writing down all that was stolen and it was a really, really, really long list. It really would have been easier if they would have stolen the trailer attached to our truck because at least it would have been only one (or just a few) thing to think about. As it was we had 10 rubbermaids we had to think about. Who wants the clothes and shoes and hiking boots of a 5 year old? Who wants someone else's clothes, shoes, socks, underwear? It really is a surreal experience when you realize all of the things that you collect over 5 1/2 years (or almost 18 years in Mom and Dad's case). The little waffle maker they had gotten as a wedding present was in there, and while it wasn't sentimental or anything it is something that they have had for the past almost 18 years that they now have to replace. The most expensive single item was our Vitamix blender. Yes, as the insurance guy said, if you have a Vitamix you will know why we bring it camping with us. We use it every single day. The most valuable item to us was the rubbermaid that had our binder with our financial information in it. Yes, it was silly to leave that in the back of the truck but we really didn't think about these particular rubbermaids as being set apart from the others we brought. It was all our stuff so we didn't think about bringing in just those rubbermaids. The funny thing is that we usually bring in a rubbermaid for each of us but Mom thought she would be smart and only put our clothes for the two days in a backpack so we only had to bring in our toiletry bin. If we did things like normal at least we would still have Mom's, Dad's, and my bin plus the toiletries, and maybe we would have brought the other two important ones in. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20, right.

We had planned to head out to Glacier that morning, and amazingly after we called our bank and got all of our accounts changed and our cards cancelled we decided that there wasn't anything else we could do and we might as well continue on our road trip. We hit the road, stopped in Missoula to hit an REI, Ross, Walmart, and Costco to get the essentials for the rest of our trip, and got to our camping spot at about one on the morning. It was a LONG day.

And this has been a long post, so I think I'll leave you with one little teaser picture. I'll post about our Glacier trip every few days because as I said, I have a bazillion (is that a word) pictures to share with you.

Until next time . . .