Slow Day

Good morning, my friends. Happily, we will be back on the road today, heading for Idaho. We have just shy of 900 miles and two more stops before reaching home on Friday. We're hopeful nothing else will throw us off schedule.

Mike had an hour's drive into Salt Lake City yesterday to get the replacement spring. He'd called ahead, but upon arrival at his first stop, they were out of the part he needed. Apparently broken springs on RVs are a common problem. The guy there was kind enough to make a call to another company...also sold out. Finally, he called a manufacturer who had 200 of them! Mike bought four. There are four springs on the RV. One was replaced in Petaluma. One was replaced here in Perry. Two more will replace the two unbroken springs when we get home. The last one will be a spare. Good thinking on Mike's part to carry a spare. If this had happened in a smaller place, we might have been stuck there waiting for a part to be shipped to us.

While he was out getting the part, I spent some time on my slow-stitching. I stitched far enough to decide to move my hoop.

This is the next section I'll be working on. 

Now here's something: Have you ever noticed how certain products seem to be magical? Two come to mind in our own household. The first is the can of Pam Non-Stick cooking spray. I shake the can. It sounds empty. Nevertheless, I can continue to spray non-stick spray on my pans for another several days before I give up on it. I call that the magic part of the can. 

Another one is the small bottle of eye drops we use for itchy allergic eyes. The little bottle sounds empty, and yet, I can usually get around ten more drops out of it. Magic. 

And that brings me to this ball of Valdani floss. I've been working on finishing off this first ball of floss for at least a week. This is how much I started with after moving my hoop.

With each stitching session, I think, surely I'll use the last of it this time. So I stitched all of the tree on the left, part of the middle tree, and some more of the covered bridge. I used about seven lengths of floss for this.

And still...there is floss. I expect I can do this morning's stitching as well, and I'll still have floss left over. It's magic, I tell you. It's a never-ending ball of floss. 

So aside from musing over the magical ball of floss, I also baked a Dutch Apple Pie for Two. I brought a jar of homemade apple pie filling from home. The filling was made with apples from Erik and Mae's tree. 

I put lots of streusel topping on it. That *is* the best part. Wouldn't you agree? And I'm calling this a pie "for two," but it's actually a pie for four. We only ate half last night, and so we have another half for tonight's dessert.

Like I said, it was a slow day. I don't have much to tell you this morning. We'll be getting underway in a couple of hours, and we expect to be just east of Boise, Idaho, by this evening. I realized I was a little turned around for today's drive. We wanted to stop at Shoshone Falls along our way, but it turns out that Shoshone Falls is farther down the road than tonight's stop. It's about a 45 minute drive beyond our stopping point, and so we'll stop and unhitch, and then go see the falls. We're also one dinner short of making it home, and so we'll find a place to eat out tonight. It'll be a nice ending to our trip.

Mike is still sleeping as I write this, and so I'll head on over and try to find the end of that ball of floss this morning. Maybe today is the day I will use the last of it.