Final week in Palm Desert, or so we thought...

"Man plans, and god laughs" - my favorite saying of my mom's...
We did pretty good with all of our "plans" this summer until the last one. We were going to meet up with Wayne and his daughter and another friend to caravan down the peninsula a couple of days after Bill got down to the desert. But I had a little "incident" with our truck cab window and my mother's garage. I had the window popped up as I was backing up the truck onto the driveway to get it close to the garage so it would be more convenient and in the shade to pack, when I heard a little crunching sound. The good part was that I was moving slowly, but in the end it didn't really matter. The window got overextended and the frame bent...what a mess. It was a Lehr cab which is a big company in northern California, but no one in southern CA, south of Orange County, keeps them in stock because there are so many different sizes. I got quoted 2-4 weeks by everyone I spoke to. Finally I asked Bill to help and he found a place in San Diego that thought they could get it in a week, but it wasn't 100%. Bill did not want to travel through Mexico with an unlocked window to our cab that was packed with a lot of stuff we didn't want to lose. Plus, getting it fixed down there could be impossible, who knows. So we were stuck. As I stood there contemplating all of the crap we had unloaded into my parent's garage, so we wouldn't have to drive around town with all of that weight, I just couldn't imagine all of it fitting into the truck. We had driven all of the stuff down from our storage unit in Tahoe with the truck and the u-Haul with my parent's antiques in it, so I really had no clue what would actually fit. But I've packed that truck quite a few times, and even with my expert packing skills I was not confident it would fit.

During our summer travels I had started inquiring with a San Diego shipping company, that I knew shipped down to our area, about rates for shipping used goods. I knew that for anything new they charge 36%, duty plus their fee, but found out that for used goods they charge by the weight and dimensions. How we were going to get everything to San Diego that wouldn't all fit in the truck was going to be an issue. But now that we had all of this extra time, with nothing much to do, I proposed that we just make a day trip down to San Diego and deliver a bunch of stuff to ship down so we didn't have to stress with the packing. Bill came up with the great idea to pack up the bins/boxes with our lightest weight stuff, which was mostly our clothing and drive the heavy stuff down. And what a great idea that turned out to be. We ended up shipping 8 rather large bins and an end table down. They delivered it to our home a couple of days after we arrived and the total cost was $240!! Best money we ever spent! And we got to meet up with Bill's buddies Scott and Jean for lunch too.

Lunch at Native Foods, Bill's favorite!

During this time our friend, Wayne, made it back to Los Barriles and sent us pictures of our home so we could see what happened during the summer! Oy Vey!

When we left at the end of July the only thing green on our property was the sissoo (sp?) plants growing on the fence. And the plant in that one brown pot above. All of that stuff in the planters and everywhere else, NONE of that was there, it was all just plain old sand...and dirt in the garden beds. Oh WOW!!! What a mess!! Wayne asked if we wanted his "guy" to clean it up and unwrap the house for us, meaning to uncover everything we had covered up, turn on the a/c and the fridge. We said a resounding YES, PLEASE!!!

We stayed a few more days in Palm Desert, in the miserable heat, and finally packed up the truck and drove to San Diego. Luckily the day before we left we heard from the company that our window was on the truck heading south! It was October 10th, our 7th wedding anniversary and we went to one of our favorite plant-based restaurants, The Gratitude Cafe - and we had a lot to be grateful for! We stayed in an AirBnB with a couple of nice guys, got our pesos from Costco, did one final shop at a natural foods store, and were ready to begin the very last leg of our journey home!