The tour starts today!

That’s an announcement, but no surprise and not really an important announcement.  Everyone who’s been following along so far already knew that anyway.

We’re in Mount Vernon tonight, right on schedule.  We got out of our dive motel and down to the Amtrak station on time this morning to make our 7:20 departure to Seattle; we enjoyed a very pleasant train ride, and made fine use of our seven hour layover there by biking over to mom and dad’s and spending the afternoon sharing lunch and catching up; and we made it back down to the Union Station in plenty of time to grab a sandwich at a sidewalk cafe before boarding the 7:00 evening train to Mount Vernon.  So far so good - we’re checked in at our motel, ready to bike to Anacortes in the morning for the San Juan Island ferry.

I even came away with some photos I was pleased with - a few nice ones of us with mom and dad, a photo of our bikes safely locked up by the cafe I snapped just to show how prudent and responsible we are, and some nice shots taken from the train.  I was especially pleased with the shot of the Saint Johns Bridge I took as we were crossing the Willamette on the Union Pacific bridge - it’s quite a challenge trying to time and focus a shot in the gaps between the girders as the train speeds past them, and I did pretty well.  Not perfect, but good enough to share.

So that’s news too, but nothing really out of the ordinary for the start of a tour.  Not really news meriting an importantly announcement.

The important announcement is that you can’t see any of today’s pictures yet, and probably not ever.  They’re lost because I downloaded them from my camera to the iPad at the cafe by the train station, and then deleted them from the camera.

And then my iPad was stolen.  So, no photos today; and no Scott’s iPad.

We don’t really know what happened.  One minute, we were packing up to leave the cafe to bike two blocks to the train station; but when we arrived there a few minutes later, my iPad was gone.  We went through some mental gyrations trying to recreate what must have happened, but soon gave up because there’s no point.  It’s just gone.

It’s not a crisis - it’s only stuff, it’s not like sustaining an injury or losing our passports again - but it sure is disruptive, stressful and disappointing.  Not a crisis that is, as long as we don’t become victims of identity theft and  find our bank accounts cleaned out.  Now that really would be a crisis. 

I suspect I’ll put the journal on hold until I replace the iPad (I’m using Rachael’s tonight, but that will get old fast), but hopefully that will occur tomorrow morning - there’s a Best Buy just two miles from our motel and we have plenty of time to stop by there in the morning before heading west to the ferry terminal.  If not there, then we’ll have to wait a few days until we reach Victoria.

Who knows?  When I get a new tablet and it’s reloaded from the backup waiting up there in The Cloud, maybe the missing photos will show up too.  We still might see those photos of mom and dad yet.