It’s over. My birthday vacation. I think my birthday festivities are over now and I can just sit back now and relax and appreciate the fact that I’m “that” age. I know a couple years ago when we went to Branson I started writing a daily blog with photos but never got it finished. I think I gave up after two days. I’m going to try and do better this time.

Our First Day, July 31, 2024, St. Louis to Arcata, California  6,408 steps

The day started very early at 3 am. We were at the airport by 4. The first leg of our trip was to Minneapolis. The pilot announced that due to some weather were going to be routed to the west to avoid it but that might make arrival time for some passengers needing to catch a connecting flight kind of short. His ending comment was that he was going to do the best that he could and would “burn the paint off the plane” to get us there as quickly as possible. He was as good as his word because we arrived 7 Minutes before our scheduled arrival time.Then it was on to the next leg of our flight from Minneapolis to San Francisco. San Fran is two hours behind us, so with the time change we got in around 1130. I was fascinated by the topography below us as we flew over Nevada and Arizona. I spent a lot of time craning my head around to see out the window that was at my right shoulder.
We landed at San Fran and took the tram to the Hertz car rental and then we were off on our five hour drive north to Arcata. Good thing about this drive is it is a straight shot up Highway 101. Some of it is four lanes and some of it is two lanes. My thoughtful daughter had made a playlist of all kinds of songs we could sing to including two of my favorites, John Denver and Jim Reeves. So we drove and sang and talked. It was wonderful.

Trees everywhere. I don’t know how many times looking out the car window I said “Oh wow.” After stopping at a market to pick up some groceries ( and man are they expensive here, along with gas that is over $5 a gallon) we finally arrived at our AirBnB, a nice two-bedroom cabin on a wooded lot. Our 18-hour travel day was finally over.