Thanksgiving Thankful Garland for the Fireplace

I was so well-prepared for Thanksgiving I had time to make a Thankful Garland for the fireplace. After all, I’d been planning for nearly a year since my inlaws aren’t able to visit very often. The house was decorated, the meal was planned, the groceries were purchased, the house was clean.  It was nearly, practically perfect.  We just had to pick up Gramma and Grandpa from the  train station.

Good thing we checked first.  Instead of arriving on the West Coast at 9am, they were still stuck somewhere in Idaho.  They were not going to be into Spokane until around 6pm, then they would have to take a bus for the rest of the journey.

I had a full day to myself.  So, I did what any woman would do, I found something to do, thanks to Jen, who created the original Thankful Garland.

My dear hubby drove his 4×4 Jeep down the icy streets to Michaels.

Meanwhile, my in-laws were on a nightmare journey. Because it was so cold throughout the entire midwest, the trains had to move slower than usual.  Much, much slower.  For hours of the trip they were behind a freight train going 10 miles per hour.  Since train engineers can only drive for 12 hours at a time, they repeatedly ended up waiting for a new conductor.  If he was three hours away, his work day began when he jumped in his car to drive.  By the time he arrived at the train, he could drive the train 9 hours, when his shift was done, they waited for a new engineer to drive in from another city.

The bus ride was worse.  They ended up having four drop-off/pick-ups, so instead of a three or four hour interstate ride, it became nearly a 9 hour drive into small towns and smaller roads.

Yes, at one point the GPS led the bus driver into a small road where he couldn’t back up.  He had to wake up the owner of the house at the end of the road and have him bring out a flashlight and help him get the bus back on the road.  Then, the people they were supposed to pick up in this small town way up in the mountains in WA, were not there.

Meanwhile, hubby and I were waiting in our car at the locked Amtrack station where they were supposed to arrive at midnight.  Ever try to find a bathroom open at 2:30am?  Even if a business is open, their policy is to NOT let anyone use their bathrooms because of the kind of people that are usually on the streets at that hour.  By 3 am, I was looking like one of those people.

But, their bus finally arrived and we finally got a few hours of sleep before Thanksgiving Day officially began.