We all certainly share the same love of road trips. And don’t forget, I have spent some great moments of my life with you guys in the pouring rain wearing a garbage bag (aka “the lunch bag of Notre Dame) on family vacations, too.

(In fact, I’ll make you a deal. If you have one or 2 of those trip pictures scanned that you can email to me, I’ll put them up on the site!)

Our car is a (2004?) Mini Cooper S, with the Cooper Works package (including the sports suspension, so while it handles great, the mileage is a wee bit lower than for a standard-issue Mini). In other words, we’re traveling light!

The Mini is silver, with a black checkerboard stripe. In fact, the pictures in the header of the blog (so far) are close-ups of the car (covered in love bugs on our May road trip to Miami).

Neil and I both want to get more and better pictures up on the site soon. In the meantime, even if you don’t have a good visual on the car, I am so pleased that you and Ross could see us when we went through Calgary for the Paddy Crean Stage Combat Workshops in Banff in 2003, so at least you can picture Neil (and understand why I’m so happily married). Neil was really thrilled to meet you two as well, and we only regret we didn’t really get a visit in with Gord and his family or get to see Robb at all that trip.

We’ve already managed a few good trips together: our engagement trip on the motorcycle from San Francisco to Dallas; our honeymoon driving a Uhaul truck from Vancouver to Texas (very romantic!); lots of little trips from different parts of the country to visit Neil’s family in Charleston, SC (but never enough); taking Mom and Dad on the grand tour of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia for Mom’s 70th birthday; jaunts down to Cape Fear in North Carolina to visit my Uncle Jayne; and a working vacation down to Miami in May this year with a return trip by way of Atlanta which turned out to be the dress rehearsal for the trip we’re on now. Plus driving Neil’s rebuilt ’66 Bronco over the Coquihalla from Vancouver to Kelowna to introduce him to Mom and Dad for the first time, when the fan exploded through the radiator at the highest point of the Coq at Elkhart Summit, and we had to hitchhike to the lodge, and then get a tow down into the valley and leave Neil’s primer grey truck with South Carolina plates sitting in Mom and Dad’s driveway for a week until we could come back and do the repairs. What an entrance!

We have innovated a new, high tech way to get lost: we use Garmin GPS software and Google Maps on Neil’s Blackberry for directions, and yet we still manage to wind up in the middle of nowhere. I think it must be a genetic road trip talent.

Neil and I married later than you two did, so our fingers are crossed that we’ll be lucky enough to get 43 years together (at least!), and I hope we weather them all as well as you two have.

We’ll keep you posted on our adventures in the meantime, and we’ll see what we can do about getting some good car pictures up here for you, too.

Thanks again for dropping by, beautiful, and please send our love to Ross and everyone in and around Calgary!

Ross and I always knew there was something very special in your future. I cannot think of anything more fun and warming than a road trip together. We have done our share of them and they give us memories for pillow talk now that we are in our middle sixties. Forty three years of marriage and many, many miles together give you lots of hilarious memories to share later in life.

Being the visual person, I am, I need to know the make and colour of your vehicle so I can envision you and Neil on your journey. Feet out the window, or wind in your hair, it sounds like a lovely time together. Some of our more interesting trips came when we were “lost” thanks to my road map interpretations.

“Remember those gingerbread pancakes they served on the Oregon coast” and “Remember the quaint little motel where we drove our car into a tiny underground garage with creaky wooden doors to keep the sea spray off the car?” Precious memories of times together and wrong turns and right turns that were meant to be. Happy trails you two, we will be thinking of you.

The weather has been wet the last few days, so I’m back to lots of sleep, and Neil has had his hands more than full with lots of programming, but we’re looking forward to getting more posts up here soon.

We definitely have to write up the story of packing and getting out of Richmond, which was a whole adventure in itself!

If nothing else, our previous moving experience (Neil’s airforce childhood, my international travels, our 17 addresses while married, and now this) helped prepare us for this “big” move so we had some idea what we were doing when we threw everything into storage!