Star Lake in Retrospect, Fixing the Mustang, The New Plan for Getting to Seattle and the Cheese Conference

I cannot resist posting a final couple of Star Lake photos from the Reunion and one taken on Patsy's deck looking over the lake on one of our last evenings. The wine was good. The sky was clear. The air was warm. The loons were calling.

We had a grueling trip home, with road work stoppages that lasted as long as an hour, and heavy awful rains off and on for two days. Luckily, we had a great evening and another great sushi meal with Meg and Steve in Lexington. But on the second day of the trip we got sideswiped by a hit and run driver in SC. The new little Mustang got the worst of it. We pulled off and examined ourselves and the car. Finding no blood nor any damage that interfered with driving, we drove on and called our USAA insurance agent from the road.

We were glad to get home and to get the car inspected the next day. We had only three days home before our scheduled departure for the big road trip to Seattle for the American cheese Society Conference and three weeks of hiking in the Pacific Northwest. 

I took the Mustang in to the dealer service folks to change oil before the long drive. The air bag light came on in Star Lake & stayed on...so asked them to check it. SIX DAYS later we got the car back! That was 3 days after we needed to leave...so I bought plane tix. Seems the module that tells the 2 passenger air bags to deploy in a crash had an "open circuit" in it. Had to take out seat & carpeting to fix + they didn't have the part! 

As we flew over all the beauty of the Bad Lands, Custer Canyon, & mountains today I felt cheated by Ford & the Santa Fe Ford service folks. But it would have been a very long drive...that's the other side. Fate wins. 


So here we are in beautiful, warm, sunny Seattle. We visited Beechers Cheese and saw their cheddaring operations.

We just had a super delightful meal on the waterfront on an outdoor terrace at The Pink Door. They had a great picture on the wall of a dog like Pam's Mardi, except he was being angelic.




Great food. Great service. Now we're relaxing in our room on 29th floor. Nice view of Seattle. No travel glitches today. Happy campers. Conference starts tomorrow. I expect to volunteer in the judging of the 1000+ cheeses that have been entered into the competition this year. Russ will take the Cheeses of the Olympic Peninsula Field Trip.