July 15 - 17, 2006

Okay, my aunt, Elaine, does a "grand circle" of the west coast when she visits from Pennsylvania. Starting down in L.A. (where she usually would visit her father -- who died in May), then up to Sacramento and the Bay Area (to visit sis, me, and her old Bay Area friends), and up to Oregon to see her sister Lorna and her family. She usually flies out of Portland. I wanted to see more of the family and to help with some interviews of family members in Oregon as part of the memorial for my grandfather. There is a reunion up in Oregon (Florence in mid-Oregon near Eugene) of my paternal grandmother's family (my paternal grandfather is the one that just died). Elaine is always happy to find a companion for her trip up to Oregon, so she offered to pay for my bus ticket, if I'd go with her on Greyhound. Elaine is a semi-regular bus traveler and even did a cross-country trip a few years back to help a friend pick up a car, but I digress. I was not convinced this was a good idea, but I figured if anything went wrong, I could whine to her about it. For reasons I won't go into here, I was in the kind of mood where I was seeing the black lining in every off-white cloud at this point too.

It went really well. I figured the trip up was no problem, because if it was bad I could share the misery and laugh about it with Elaine. The first leg went really well, and we even narrowly avoided disaster (we tried to get onto an earlier bus, and didn't succeed, that bus broke down and had a 4 hour wait in the hot sun for a replacement). I had lots of snacks in a cooler, lots of Sudoku's, an engrossing book ("The Ionian Mission" by Patrick O'Brian), and a bunch of tunes and podcasts on my MP3 player. I also found a really great travel pillow.

Okay, so that was Friday. On Saturday, it was off to the Eugene Saturday Market for breakfast, food for the picnic and more. Then we left for the reunion. My (first) cousin Angela was there with a video camera she had used at the Mercer family picnic on the Fourth. She interviewed some of my grandmother's first cousins about my great-grandparents' marriage-divorce. The thing was a whole sordid mess because, my great-grandfather divorced my great-grandmother, and married her sister. I'm not making this up! It happened in the 1920s/30s and what a stir it caused in the family. My dad always jokes that his great-uncle David is younger than he is, but then he is a cousin too! All this was really wrenching at the time though, and the (now older) cousins were hesitant to speak about it, till we pointed out almost everyone is dead now (except for uncle/cousin Dave -- but I digress). We did seem to figure out that the Greats may have anticipated the wedding because one of the cousins (Florence) checked the marriage date and the date of birth of the first child and the difference was NOT nine months, hmmm. It was FASCINATING trying to tease out what happened from their memories and trying to sort out when things really happened, from when they learned/found out about things.

The trip back was FINE! It was much emptier on the bus. I had two seats to myself until Marysville (the last stop before Sacramento). The guy who sat next to me was very big (and with my size it made it cramped) but he kept to himself, and didn't smell like cigarettes. The only characters on the trip were:

1. A twitchy lady in front of me that either had ADHD or was a speed freak. Thankfully she was off the bus at the first or second stop.

2. A young man at the Medford bus station with a "4" tat on his brow (indicating his gang affiliation).

3. Another young gentleman wearing a t-shirt that read "I'm not a gynecologist, but I'll take a look." I felt like asking him to check out my episiotomy scar to see if that would freak him. Maybe I could describe a (non-existent) prolapsing uterus too?

Elaine provided me with a wonderful set of night shades from Lufthansa, so I slept and read a lot. I may try this again (she says tempting fate).