After ‘The Procedure’

I love road trips – all kinds of road trips.  I like the trips that are all planned out and you know where you’ll be staying, when you will get there, what you will do and maybe even where you will eat.  I also like unplanned, just-drive-until-you-feel-like-stopping road trips.  I like long road trips and short road trips and trips that most people wouldn’t even consider a real-for-sure road trip.  Like coming home from Portland after a ‘medical procedure.’  (Have you noticed how much that expression has crept into our vocabulary of late?)

We had been in the Rose City for two days/nights while Nyel had a cardiac ablation (time will tell as to its success) and since he is not to drive for a few days, I was the designated driver.  That’s not usually the case on road trips so I felt heady with power.  We were both hungry, so we stopped at the Oak Tree in Woodland for a brunch of steak and eggs – a nine on a scale of one-to-ten! (The coffee was not very strong and not very hot, but everything else was perfect.)

The Oak Tree

We hadn’t been there for at least a year because, according to the waitress, that’s when they remodeled.  The big gift shop is gone and now there is a ‘casino’ which is actually a card room – no slot machines or gambling.  The Oak Tree has been there (with gift shop, as far as I can recall) for 53 years our waitress said.  Seeing its new configuration was definitely yesterday’s Road Trip Adventure Number One.

The Chevron station next door had a car wash so we decided to take advantage of its proximity.  We paid $7.50, went through the “hula hula skirts” as my kids used to call those big plastic scrubbers and came out a few minutes later still not able to see through the grime of the back window.  I went, without much hope, to the person in charge of the service station and she not only apologized profusely but immediately gave me a ticket with a code number and told me to go through again “on us.”

The New 7-Up?

Meanwhile, Nyel had manually washed off the rear window with some success, but we weren’t on a time schedule so we took advantage of the re-do offer.  No improvement.  And, on inspection, we noticed that not only the window but the entire real end of the car was still pretty dirty.  Our conclusion:  that spiffy ‘spoiler’ look of the Prius-C is definitely a Design Flaw when it comes to staying clean.  It seems to be a magnet for road grime but is angled in a way that can’t easily be cleaned by a mechanical carwash.  Thus ended Adventure Number Two.

Our next adventure took place in Westport at the minimart by the Shell Station.  We were both thirsty and Nyel wanted to stretch his legs, so he went in to get a 7-Up.  He came back with the amazing “news” from the woman in charge that 7-Up was no longer being made and they were now calling the beverage “Sierra Mist.”  She insisted that it was “the same thing.”  Nyel got a bottle of water, instead, and we spent the next few miles wondering if she really believed what she told him or if she had hit on that as a new sales technique.  Or maybe the minimart in Westport is on a cutting edge of product revision that no one else has yet heard of.  And so ended yesterday’s Adventure Number Three.

I just love road trips!  Or did I mention that before?