Day 1 - July 25th

After all the planning, preparations, making reservations, shopping, scheduling pool vacation maintenance, dropping Kronk the bearded dragon at a friend's house, Pippin at the dog boarders, worrying about expenses, and leaving for the airport on time, it wasn't exactly a relief to finally be on our way because of George's new medical condition that he doesn't like to be talked about. But it's effects were such a big part of our trip, I don't see how I can write about the trip without mentioning it. Why are men so reluctant to talk about any problems? Since he is so reluctant, and hadn't even discussed it in detail with me, you can see what a big deal it was for him to take himself to the doctor a few weeks before our trip. I'll just say that he probably has cardiac ischemia and angina where the heart periodically - way too often - doesn't get enough blood supply and oxygen so that there are symptoms. The doctor won't know what's causing it until he does a heart catheterization which he wanted to do while we were gone and didn't like that we were going to go anyway. Well would you rather die having a very nice time or at your office desk? We picked the former, which by the mercy of God hasn't happened. His heart cath is scheduled for this Monday, please pray that they find the problem and fix it without further ado.

So until we got on the Dawn Princess to make our way to Southeast Alaska, we kept wondering if we were doing the right thing or if he should go ahead and check into a hospital in the cities we passed on the way to San Francisco because his symptoms got bad a few times, though characteristic of angina, they went away after taking newly prescribed nitro glycerin under the tongue. But once we were on the ship, he started to relax more which decreased his symptoms notably.  One thing that helped was that the ship's rocking motion made him not know if he were still dizzy or if it was the boat. He chose to believe it was the boat. And the first few days, there were high winds and waves that caused the ship to rock enough to make very loud clanging noises in the lovely elevators. I even got sea sick.

Back to driving to the airport in Dallas. It so happens that that morning there were terrible explosions of propane barrels in Dallas right by the intersection of I-30 and I-35, which was on our route, and which we could see a few miles before we got there.






















































We didn't hear what the cause of the upcoming billowing flames, smoke, and loud booms that swelled enormously and receded every few seconds until we turned on the radio after we had passed through flying, flaming barrel lids that went right over our van as we crossed the overpass getting on 35 from 30! That was at the peak of the fire, immediately after which they closed the highways. We would have missed our flight if we'd crossed one minute later. It was interesting seeing it on CNN at the Phoenix airport during our lay-over. More on Explosions here. And here's a video that shows the hurtling lids.

I guess smooth sailing wouldn't have been as exciting to write about after the fact. I'm glad for the distance time has given me to be able to write this knowing all 8 of us our 15 pieces of checked in luggage and 4 carry on's, as well as Pippin, Kronk, and the swimming pool survived intact.