An early departure from Redding brought us by dawn to the southern border of the mythical state of Jefferson, that slice of the Pacific Northwest that encompasses the mountainous area between the Sacramento and Willamette Valleys.

Lunch today is Thanksgiving leftovers at roadside stops, and we quickly find ourselves through Oregon and back into our home state of Washington, in time to pick up our cat from “Just Cats” halfway between Olympia and Shelton, arriving at home just before dark, unloading the car from our long 30-day, 8,000-mile circumnavigation of the country. In the night, the rain starts, a soft, steady cascade that continues though the next day. We are home at last.

Afterword:

Several days before we arrived home, the first harbingers of Northwest winter had knocked out power long enough to drain the server batteries at Chaos Central, so we spent a bit of time getting all of the network services back on line, particularly those that require manual initiation after reboot. The last few days of our travels, not being able to “call home” and using our tunneled, encrypted proxy for Internet browsing safety, we relied instead on the Tor anonymizer service, which, though designed for a different goal, is, for our purpose, also an encrypted remote proxy that protects from packet snooping and firesheep attacks as well as disguising the location. Our dedicated proxy server makes all our browsing appear to come from our home location, while Tor packets are scattered among many locations. Both ideas are useful for working through firewalls and for maintaining security in untrusted public networks. At hotels and coffee shops requiring a web-based login, we use a separate browser for the network login, then do all our other browsing through the proxy or Tor network.

Hey, all this ‘Net jargon must mean we’re back at work. But, for 30 days, we suspended time and lived in another set of problems. If that’s what a vacation is, then we must have had one, the longest ever.

On actual Thanksgiving Day, we rose early and walked around the block, picking up a few extra items at a nearby grocery: blocks are large in Anaheim, encompassing whole neighborhoods in little loops and cul-de-sacs. Once again, we sat to table in mid-afternoon for yet another feast. This time, the main course was ham, with a token bit of sliced turkey breast. In the morning, we had a light breakfast of fresh cinnamon rolls and headed, finally, north at last.

Darkness finds us at Redding, halfway home, and we spend a last night on the road.

We left Tuesday at dawn, which comes late in Las Cruces, in the shadow of the Organ Mountains, and headed once more onto I-10 West. We manage to once again evade the clutches of Homemade Security at the “Papers Please” checkpoint just west of Las Cruces, but it will only be the first of many as we pass through Arizona and southern California.

West of Tucson, we turned onto I-8, to avoid the Phoenix traffic and to break new ground, neither of us having been across California on I-8. We spent the night in Yuma/Winterhaven, twin cities of RV parks straddling the time zone boundary. An early start gets us well into California by sunup.

At San Diego, we turn north, arriving in Anaheim in early afternoon, in time to do our Thanksgiving shopping: pie and potato salad for everyone and edamame salad for us.

We rolled into Las Cruces on the Saturday night before Thanksgiving to find that our children and grandchildren had arranged an early Thanksgiving celebration just for us, on Sunday. We also discovered that, with their busy lives, our random appearances in their fair city mark the only times all of our extended family gets together, so it was also a family reunion of sorts. Of course, we also took time to visit as many individually as had time for us in our brief stay.

Here’s a photo gallery of some of the folks we cherish and are thankful to be part of our family:

We missed a few, who could not be at the reunion. We also gained a few, notably Ricardo and his dad, Rick, who are part of Kristi’s life now.

We managed a bit of quality time with our son, Jason, a busy restaurateur, by catching him between shifts, for breakfast and dinner.