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On the last Saturday in January, we drove to Ellensburg, WA, to pick up Nathaniel’s truck from his friend Aaron who had been working on it / getting it ready for Nat to actually drive! (It has been mostly sitting in the garage since he bought it in October 2018.) We just went for a night, and it wasn’t really a vacation since we weren’t even supposed to be leaving the state because of COVID. We stayed in Kittitas, 15 minutes east of Ellensburg, at a no-contact place called Brew House Boarding. It is a tiny town. That giant Trump sign on a vacant building was out our window. For dinner we got takeout from Ellensburg Pasta Company. We ate while we watched a virtual event through my library. We went for a long walk around the town in the dark.

The next day we walked the dogs on the John Wayne Trail. We went to see a statue of Washoe the chimpanzee, who lived in Ellensburg and used sign language, and then got donuts before hitting the road back to Portland. We stopped at the Maryhill Fruit Stand, the halfway point in the gorge where we had met Aaron to hand over the truck in early December, to take photos. Nat had just shaved his beard the week before! Hadn’t seen his bare face in over a decade. It’s pretty freaky to look at these pictures, as his beard has been fully back for a while now. And he has been driving the truck pretty regularly since! It’s fun and speedy. Definitely my favorite of all the auxiliary cars he’s/we’ve bought. I will learn how to drive it someday.