Day 20–Slip it to the right

Today was driving.  From Spokane, out of Washington, across Idaho, and then down through Montana almost to Wyoming and Yellowstone.  The section of Idaho we went through was all mountains, so no potato for Aryn.

We did stop somewhere in Montana to get a huckleberry shake, which was quite good.

The plan was for three nights here, then on across South Dakota and then up to Grand Forks, but we’re behind schedule.

Much like with a software project, I had a perfectly reasonable schedule when we left Orlando.  I researched the driving time between cities and how long we’d stay in each place, put it in Excel, added three days for unexpected contingencies, and figured we were set.

Then, early in the project drive, scope-creep wormed its way in.  A night in Austin when we were supposed to push through to Carlsbad, an extra night in Albuquerque to avoid getting to Vegas on a Friday, an extra night in Vegas to see a third show – all reasonable and, hey, had that contingency time and we could probably make up a day between Vegas and San Francisco anyway. 

Well, the convention in San Francisco made making up the day and arriving early not so feasible, which put us on track to arrive home on the 24th.  On schedule, but with no contingency.

Then the tire problem, which ate three hours of the morning on the way out of San Francisco … three hours isn’t a problem, right?  But it cascaded into us coming out of Crater Lake at dusk, which doubled the time it took to get off the mountain and forced us to stop short of Seattle (cascaded in the Cascades, get it?).  There’s a day onto the right of the schedule.

The routing off of Ranier yesterday, which took us back toward Tacoma and Seattle and around the north side of the mountain was a complete cluster.  I’d originally headed east out of the park, towards Yakima, which would have put us on track.  But on the road down to Yakima we hit construction and it was one-laned and it’s a longer road – after coming down from Sequoia in the dark and coming down from Crater lake in the dark, I didn’t want to take a chance on a third time and winding up behind schedule. 

Look how well that worked out.

So the remaining schedule looks like:

I emailed work and let them know I won’t be in until Monday, 7/30.