Preparation and hitches.

Today we started getting ready for our next trip in earnest. Terry has spent time in the garden cutting hedges and mowing lawns, besides sorting our apple crop which he and Stu took off the tree on Sunday. I've been collecting stuff, cut Terry's hair, weeded some Bristol sinks we grow flowers in and generally tidying up. There is always some last minute panic. This time, we realised that we had not renewed the trailer and car tags (like the UK tax discs) which ran out at the end of August. So Terry has had to renew them on line and they will be posted to our mail box and then they can forward them on to us. We have a print out of the transaction so hope that will be OK until we actually receive the tags and get them onto the rig. We are not sure if it's an offence not to display the tags if they are on their way or not - watch this space to see if we get a citation or not. Yesterday we went shopping for presents for people who we stay with or who offer us hospitality in any way. I love giving a little something from the UK to these kind folk. We went into deep Yorkshire to get these and had a lovely day in the beautiful Yorkshire countryside, with a lovely lunch out to boot. Shame it's getting a bit Autumnal here as it was overcast and the wind was a bit chilly. I expect we'll find the same sort of weather in the North West of the USA again. Hope we beat the snow. We fly from our local airport to Amsterdam early Thursday morning and then from Amsterdam to Seattle. We plan to stay a few nights in Seattle to explore the city, then we drive, in a hire car, down to the south side of Mount Ranier for one night. We HOPE we see the mountain this time, as last trip we camped for 3 nights on the east side and never saw it as the clouds never lifted. We did see it out of the airplane window as we flew into Seattle but we want to see it close to. Fingers crossed. Then we will drive for a couple of days to get to our friends Chuck and Carla who live near Boise , Idaho. Looking forward to seeing them again as we had such a blast with them at the end of our last trip. We will then pick up the rig, say a sad goodbye to Chuck and Carla and set off on our travels.