“Take water! Take plenty of water!” We were finally turning east from the Pacific coast, and our friend Bonnie was worried. She and Chuck had been spoiling us for a few days in San Diego, but they’d heard reports of 100-degree temperatures in the desert. That would be a far cry from the sweater weather we’d been enjoying, as we enjoyed elegant drinks by the beach at the posh Coronado Hotel.

A couple of hours of driving confirmed two things: 1) It was hot. 2) The air conditioning no longer worked.

Despite its faded glory and advanced age, the Squid Wagon is the most “luxurious” vehicle we’ve ever owned. That means we have features we’ve never had on another vehicle, like cruise control (yay!), power windows (boo!), and air conditioning. The AC worked great when we bought the van in Florida in 2004. Our long-haired feline traveling companion appreciated it. But after she passed away, we never used it. Who needs AC in Seattle?

At a campground outside of Yuma, Arizona, I sat down on the ground next to an old-fashioned phone booth and pulled out the phone book. There were at least 15 listings specifically for Auto Repair – Air Conditioning, plus another half-dozen mentions of AC under the general Auto Repair category.  Evidently, air conditioning is a high priority for Yumans.

So how does one select the best auto repair place out of a phone book, with no other knowledge? I studied the ads, then went on a hunch. “Here’s a place that’s been in business since the 1960′s — and the owner and service manager have the same last name.” My logic was that a family-run business that had been around for 40 years would treat their customers fairly.

And the folks at Midtown Auto did just that. We walked in and said, “We came down from Seattle, and we forgot to bring any cold with us. Do you have some you can put in our air conditioning system?”

Father and son worked on the air conditioning unit, and Mom sent us over to Bubba’s for a leisurely breakfast. When we came back, we had a nice chat with her. She was very curious about our lifestyle when she found out we were traveling from Seattle to a boat in North Carolina via Yuma, Arizona. “Are y’all missionaries?” she asked.

“No,” we laughed. We explained that we were just out traveling, seeing the world, and meeting the people in it. She was very encouraging, and when we left ($400 poorer, but most of that was freon, not labor), she wished us safe travels and a happy life. Literally, she wished us “a happy life.” Wow.

As we drove away from Yuma, the air conditioner put out ice-cold air as the hot sun shone on an amazing desert landscape. “Look at those rocks!” we exclaimed. “Hey, I just saw my first saguaro!” “Oh boy, TUMBLEWEEDS!”

I don’t know if it was the nice lady’s wishes, or just the way of the world. But we were definitely having a happy, happy life.

It started with the cookies. When Barry’s Mom asked if we’d like a batch of oatmeal scotchies for the road, we responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” Oatmeal scotchies are Barry’s favorite, and we also looked forward to sharing them with my sister, Julie, in Eugene, Oregon.

Sharon also gave me a treat: A big bag of dried Michigan cherries.

A couple of days later, we were packing the van after a visit with Tom and Gudrun in Yelm, Washington. Barry asked if they had a little ice for our cooler. Instead, Tom gave us three frozen bricks of homemade pesto. This was in addition to the bottles of homemade wine he’d just given us.

And so we traveled south to Eugene, carrying cookies and cherries and wine and pesto.

The cherries were a big hit — we shared them with Julie in our morning oatmeal. The cookies were perfect after a long day of skiing with Daisy. And when we went to Ellen and Gary’s house, we opened a bottle of Tom’s wine.

“We have some homemade pesto, too,” I told Ellen. She whipped out rice crackers, put the pesto and some swiss cheese on them, and zapped them in the microwave. Because of the merging of Italian pesto and Asian crackers, she named them “Marco Polos.”

That evening, Ellen and Gary also gave us a huge 2-horned parsnip from their garden. I thought I would make a pressure cooker stew in a few days.

A couple of days later, they invited us to a potluck dinner with their friends Barbara and Joe. We took along some more of Tom’s pesto, and when Barbara found out we were traveling, she gave us two more gifts: Homemade applesauce and elderberry jam. It was a joyous coincidence, because we’d once lived with a dear friend, also named Barbara. She’s gone now, but she made the best applesauce and elderberry jam in the world.

We were planning to visit that Barbara’s son Michael in southern California, and we couldn’t wait to share the elderberry jam with him.

And so each precious gift we receive travels down the road with us a little ways, and then we stop and share it. Then we receive another gift, which makes its way to the next stop. And the cycle continues.

We continued to the Bay area, where we visited Jeannie and Cliff and Jerry. We shared more wine and cherries, and they gave us oranges for the road.

We finally made it Michael and Doeri and Eliza’s house, with our offerings of elderberry jam and homemade wine and pesto. Remember the parsnip? It got roasted instead of stewed!

And in the middle of a conversation with Michael about a completely unrelated topic, he stopped me and said, “When you leave, don’t forget to take your jam!”

“What jam?”

When we left, he gave us many jars of his own elderberry jelly, peach jam, and burnt kumquat marmalade to enjoy and share. He’d made them for Christmas, but a kitchen remodel interfered, and they never made it into the mail. We were delighted to receive our Christmas presents in person in April.

Now we’re in San Diego with Bonnie and Chuck, eating Michael’s elderberry jelly on sourdough bread, along with fresh-picked oranges and grapefruit.

The cookies and pesto and parsnip are just fond memories now. The cherries are almost gone, too. But we still have plenty of homemade wine and jam to share, along with something sweet and crunchy to replace the cookies — caramel corn from Barry’s Aunt Jo.

When we left home, we weren’t planning to gather food and share it all the way down the west coast. It just happens that way. As Gordon Bok sings,  “Everybody puts their cookin’ hat on when you’re leavin’ in the morning.”

We’re leaving Bonnie and Chuck’s in the morning. The van seems a little overloaded, and I think we’re carrying more food than when we left. That just means we’ve been falling down on the job — we need to share it!

We’ve been out almost one week, and finally, we’re catching our breath. You can’t have fun all the time; sometimes you have to stop and write about it!

We were having such a nice time at Barry’s parents’ house, with spring flowers and daily rainbows and bald eagles overhead, home cooking and Tumblebugs and weenie roasts, we almost forgot to leave. But on Monday, March 24th, we tore ourselves away with a few tears on both sides and headed south.

Not too far, though — we only drove 60 miles. In Seattle, Jim and Barbara treated us to a farewell dinner at a breathtakingly beautiful restaurant with a view of Elliott Bay and downtown. The Pacific Northwest is a hard place to leave, filled with natural beauty and good friends. But there are grand adventures beckoning, and we talked about them over stuffed scallops and grilled mahi-mahi:

1 – March-April: The drive from Seattle to North Carolina in the Squid Wagon. Squidley is distinctive, a big blue Ford van with a tiny incongruous wooden dinghy on top. We’ll see friends from Seattle to San Diego, then turn east, camping and visiting more friends in Oklahoma and the Carolinas.

2 – April-July: Living and working aboard our Freedom 33, Flutterby, in a boatyard in Beaufort, North Carolina. The boat’s currently hauled out, but we can stay aboard while we work on it.

3 – July-???: Sailing from Hawaii to Australia aboard Complexity with Jim and Barbara and Abby. We have been dreaming about this trip since 2005, when we sailed with them to Alaska. This year, we all think it’s going to be a reality!

We made another important stop in Seattle, saying farewell to Mike and Nita aboard Odessa and buying Odessa’s original stove and oven for Flutterby. They had a new one, but it took a little prodding from well-meaning friends (us) to get it installed, since Nita was attached to the old one. She told me that knowing she could read about her trusty old stove on the Foodie Gazette website was a factor in letting it go.

Our second stop was Yelm, Washington, home of Tom and Gudrun. We’ve stopped at their 100-year-old house several times to share conversation and design silly labels for their homemade wine. We helped with Badda Bing and Goodie Two Shoes labels, and this time we did OPG: Other People’s Grapes. I love doing projects with friends, especially these two!

When we first pulled up to their house, they came out for a look at the Squid Wagon and our gear. Tom studied it a bit and then asked, “Is this everything you own? How much did you leave in storage?” After our answer (“not much”), he started to tell us about a time when all his belongings fit into the back seat of a drive-away car. I don’t think he intended the story to take all evening, but it did, like this:

“How did you end up in New Mexico?”

Then came the whole story of the girl and the overloaded convertible with the gigantic roof rack and the canoe, his friend who towed him to Virginia Beach, where he learned to hang doors and replaced the sportcar with a Ford Falcon. And then the story went to Wyoming.

“But what happened to the girl?”

And then the whole story of Wyoming, and how he got word that it was time to move on from the sheriff, and he packed up the Bellair, the car that saved his life –

“But what happened to the Ford Falcon?”

And then the story of how he and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog rolled the Ford on a patch of ice, and it came out right-side up with no injuries, but the windshield got shattered, so it was a mighty cold drive home that night.

“So how did the Bellair save your life?”

Well, that had to do with the fact that he didn’t have a girlfriend, so he stopped to see a promising prospect in Colorado. Some miners stopped by her house, and evidently, they didn’t want competition for the only girls in town. Tom escaped their beating by jumping out of the window of the house, then circled back on foot to his Bellair. The miners chased him down the highway, shooting at him — but they couldn’t catch the Bellair, so it saved his life.

“But what happened to the Bellair?”

He came out of a cafe and found someone trying to steal it. He thwarted that one, but then his stereo was stolen. So he sold the Bellair and drove from the Southwest to Connecticut without stopping for sleep. In the driveaway car, a taxicab, all his remaining belongings fit in the back seat. Which brought us back to the genesis of the story: Is this everything you own?

We left Tom and Gudrun’s house laden with gifts of wine and pesto and a grinder, and after a stop at Cabela’s (which I teasingly called “REI with guns”), we continued south. Somewhere before the Oregon border, I woke Barry from his nap, exclaiming “Holy cow! It’s snowing!” Five days later, as I write this, a rare spring snow is falling again here in Eugene, followed by blue skies and cold sunshine.

Our stay in Eugene has lasted longer than expected, but there’s so much to do with Julie and Ed and Daisy and Ellen and Gary! We’ve played pool and ping-pong, soaked in hot tubs, taken walks, visited some amazing workplaces, made dinner, had dinner made for us, ripped vinyl records to digital files, repacked the van, shopped at REI, and yesterday, we had a ski adventure with Daisy, Meps’ sister.

Daisy has discovered a special spot which has not been covered by snow in 26 years. It’s a lava flow, the kind of place that’s impossible to visit on foot or by vehicle. But covered with a thick blanket of snow, it’s possible to ski or snowshoe into this magical place and enjoy vistas and immense trees that have never seen humans.

Our friends Ellen and Gary loaned us skis, and Daisy led us into the silent white wilderness. She’s a strong skiier, but she got a tough workout, breaking trail for us. All was fine until I fell, then I discovered how hard it was to get back up!

We went up and up, and until we turned around and went down and down, I didn’t realize that it was easier going up. It had been so long since I’d skiied, I fell over and over, spending much of the day on my back like a fleece-covered cockroach. Happily, I didn’t fall down on every hill, and got to do my share of  “Wheeeeeeee!” that wasn’t always followed with “Damn!”

We have one or two more adventures planned here in Eugene, then tomorrow morning we’ll hope for clear weather over the passes to the south. Next stop, San Francisco (I think).