Leaving Liar House

To start off, a few numbers related to our move out of faculty housing:

6 rolls of packing tape

32 boxes of books

50+ pieces of fragile pottery to wrap and pack

3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, 1 living room, 1 dining room, 1 kitchen, 1 basement and 1 garage to pack up

5 hours to move everything

$625 to move everything

6 hours to clean everything (including 45 minutes on the oven alone)

3 minutes on walkthrough with the maintenance guy to check everything over, downstairs only

0 minutes on walkthrough upstairs

3 friends at final dinner before heading out, featuring food from taco truck (delicious)

3 hours to Ontario, Oregon, landing at a Holiday Inn with the softest, most comfortable bed ever

And on the way here I had to pull over to take this picture:

Then we saw a rainbow off our port side. As the sun faded, the rainbow lost the shorter end of the color spectrum, leaving only pinks and reds. We drove through the Blue Mountains, then the Wallowa Mountains, and it occurred to me that you couldn’t put two more unlike mountain systems any closer to each other. The Blues are covered in sage and scrub brush that looks like soft velvet from the highway, while the Wallowas seemed barren, rocky, so jagged they cut the fat clouds of the late spring storm. I caught my first glimpse of ball lightning in what seems like years, as rain falling from the sky typically barely makes it to the ground in Walla Walla. I will note though that we had a fairly wet spring. Wet for the desert, that is.

Driving closer to Ontario, the sky turned yellow-red, and we knew, living next to Washington State’s death row prison, that it must be a correctional institution. Sure enough, there was the sign. And this is just one of many things I’ve learned about since I moved to Wallyworld.

But now here we are on our roadtrip, and I promise many photos and hopefully, laugh-inducing stories of our latest road trip. For now, friends in Walla Walla, take care, and we’ll see you soon. Friends in DC, here we come!