Relative Something

We drove home. The weather didn’t clear up enough in the Cities for us to fly Mike’s plane back. Not for lack of us trying to will the clouds to lift. We checked for promising progress frequently throughout the day, but that didn’t seem to help. A watched weather report doesn’t necessarily clear.

The focus of our dual-purpose trip shifted more toward the speedboat motor getting serviced and the boat being brought back to the storage building on their secondary property.

That gave us time to kill, which we used for another walk through their woods.

There was a fair amount of bright fall colors in the leaves near the ground.

However, there were very few leaves of any hue left in the branches overhead.

The boat dealer told Mike they could have his motor service completed by 3:00. If flying weather was going to improve enough, Mike suspected it wouldn’t happen until around 4:00. The potential was there for us to accomplish both his main goals, even though Mike was more than willing to take care of just one and call the trip a success.

If a window of good flying weather conditions opened up, we would take it immediately and leave the boat to be picked up on a future trip to their cabin. We plotted a course of action for the day, packed up our gear, and left the cabin to walk more trails on their property.

After that, we headed to town for a late lunch and then drove to the boat dealer to wait for the service work to be completed, watching flying conditions on an app all the while.

It wasn’t improving at all.

The call to report the boat was ready came at about 2:58. We hooked it up and drove back to their property to park the boat and trailer in their storage building. Then we drove back into Grand Rapids and stopped for one last check at around 4:00.

It was obvious, which made it an easy call, despite how badly we both wanted to fly. We were driving home, and into the dark of night. The flight would have taken around an hour and twenty minutes. The drive was over three and a half hours.

However, fear not! We had each other and my digital music library for entertainment. The time passed easily, especially with Mike doing the driving. It’s a route he has traveled for 40 years, making him an excellent tour guide for points of interest along the way.

I was only away from home for 35 hours, but Asher gave me a greeting when I walked in the door like it had been a LOT longer. I suppose he was measuring my absence in dog-years.

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