I'm not quite sure where to start about the trip, so I guess I will cut and paste a letter I sent to three good friends to start things off:

It was an interesting experience. Among other things, there was 12 inches of rain in 2 days! There was some flooding. My sister and younger son went out for a walk with the dogs after the rain finally stopped. We wanted to get back to our rental condo to take showers, so we drove out to look for them. The first two creeks over the road, we were able to drive through in the big truck. The third one looked so deep we were afraid to even try it, and decided that there was no way they came walking that way...later it turns out that they did walk there. The people walked across and the dogs had to swim. It had been waist deep on Stevie. So he had a sort of cool country adventure that his overprotective parents would not have allowed him.

The house was filthy, as you would expect since it had been closed since my father got sick in the middle of December. We had seven adults, plus my children, and we got the house mostly clean, and never really got into the garage or the huge shed, other than pull the obviously valuable power tools out (a brand new lawn tractor, a chipper, stuff like that). We did God only knows how many dump runs with the trucks. My parents had cancelled checks and paperwork going back into the 1950's...they were Depression children, so they never threw out anything. The weirdest thing we found was a dead armadillo on top of the freezer out in the garage.

The only things I had wanted were my father's WW2 uniform and perhaps his desk, but we ended up bringing back two trucks filled with antique furniture and boxes of knick knacks no one else wanted and were too valuable to leave. On the last day we were there, my Dad's best friend dropped by and we let him take whatever he wanted that was left. We were going to have to pay the realtor to have it all hauled away anyway. He knew a young newly married couple who had no furniture and not a lot of money, so they will now have a kitchen table and chairs, a living room set, a dresser, three bookcases, a tv, some small kitchen appliances, etc. He got one of the rototillers, some hand tools, and the canoe...I think my Dad would have pleased by that. My Dad had a nearly new truck that we brought home. No one else wanted it, and now it will be my older son's as soon as he turns 16 next fall. So the little truck (Chevy S-10) that will be my son's, and Dan's big work truck were filled with antiques, and we rented a U-Haul for the lawn tractor and some other large power tools that my sister up in Waterford wanted (though we will be taking the chipper)...

The worst thing was expecting my Dad to walk in any minute from one of his walks. I guess I mentally know he is gone, but perhaps it hasn't emotionally sunk in yet.