We were rescued Saturday night from Green Bay Packer country and price-inflated, oversold, and unavailable game-weekend lodging by our son, Matt, who put in a 33-hour all-nighter between work and driving 500 miles round trip between work, errands, and picking us up.  We somehow wedged the tandem in the back of his van–from which half of the back seat had been removed–only having to rotate Judy’s “chopper” handlebar ends down to clear the overhead, and turn the front wheel full right, and the trailer fit beside the bike.

Sunday, we spent some quality time with our grandson, “CJ,” watching him building intricate worlds in the “Minecraft” video game, until he relinquished the set to older brother Travis and joined us on the floor building Legos, something us old folks can actually understand and keep up with…  Later, after Travis had left for work, we went to dinner.

Monday, I caught up on work, finally (but quickly) resolving an operational issue between a test system and production system at a customer site that cropped up last week when we were in bike survival mode and Internet wasteland.  Incredibly, we had managed to handle a wave of help requests from all of our clients over the last two weeks, while riding 6-8 hours a day with limited Internet access overnight.  Just as there is no retirement in the 21st century, there is no such thing as a vacation, only the late-20th-century pre-Internet quaint prediction of “Faxing from the Beach,” which is more a curse than a modern marvel.

Restless after a whole day with no bike riding, we took a brief tour of the city of Oregon, taking lunch at the Firefly Coffeehouse and  finding even the steepest hills on the south end of town no obstacle without the trailer behind us.  Later, granddaughter Ashley dropped by to visit between college classes and work, and grandson Travis dropped off his schoolbooks before heading for work also.

Tuesday, Matt had the day off (from his day job, but not his night job), so we visited until he left for work, then suited up and rode to the Library to print out our train tickets for Friday and explore the other half of the city, before stopping for lunch at a new Italian deli downtown, where a check of email  on the phone (“Faxing from the Beach,” redux) spurred us to wolf down the rest of lunch and sprint back to our computer in time for a conference call with a major client–big contract changes coming up.  Maybe this is time to wrap up loose ends and actually contemplate traditional retirement.  But, then, the bike needs an overhaul after this trip, and we need to save up gas money to visit the rest of the grandchildren this winter, and we still haven’t paid off the bathroom remodel from last year, or the car, and the airplane kit is short a propeller, radio, and instruments…

Meanwhile, our local, short rides around town have tipped our logbook over the 400-mile mark for this tour, and over the 1000-mile mark for the season, probably a record for annual mileage, if not close to it, since the 1980s, and absolutely the record for longest tour, ever. But, we have decided that the “star” tours we’ve taken over the intervening years are more our style–that’s where you travel to a destination, then ride out and back each day to explore a particular area, rather than point-to-point travel. That way, you need not carry all of your gear every day. We have another day to ride locally before we pack the bike for the train trip home.

Monday’s short loop ride…

Tuesday’s ride, cut short by emergent work duties…