We arrived back to Portland at 9:30pm Saturday night and all of our checked-in luggage arrived as well.  Normally we would have gone straight home, but Lisa was to fly out early Sunday morning to Spokane to visit with family, so we stayed overnight at the Sheraton Portland Airport.  We got pretty lucky to find this hotel and use our points with it, because all area airport hotels were fully booked due to a number of Hood to Coast participants staying overnight.  We used 7,000 of our Starwood points, which was just 1/5 of the sign-up bonus were received when we got the American Express SPG card.  We called the hotel shuttle and they picked us up in a jiff; by 10:15pm we were nicely settled into our room watching HGTV and getting ready for sleep.

Lisa was up early at 4am and got her flight to Spokane.  With late checkout offered to SPG members, I was able to stay at the hotel to rest and relax and catch up on emails and what not up until 4:00pm.  My mom picked me up shortly thereafter, and I visited with her and my brother and sister-in-law before going to pick up Lisa at 9:30pm.  And then finally it was back home…. but for poor Lisa, her school year started the very next day so she had no time to really decompress from all of our traveling!

Alas, we are back home and back to the routine of doing laundry, dirty dishes and going to work.  We had a great summer full of adventures and a little bit of work too, and we are so grateful that we have the opportunity to be together and travel together during our school furloughs.  We get to practice retirement every summer, and it doesn’t get old at all.  Yep, school has started and we are now back to work, which only means that now it is time to start planning our travels for the next summer!