A blog post triggers memories.

On this date in 2011, I wrote the last of three blog posts about what would be my last vacation with my wasband. There was supposed to be six in the series — one post for each day of the trip — but I must have gotten busy or distracted or simply lost interest and never blogged about the other three days. They’re lost in time like so many things I experienced in life and now barely remember.

(That’s why I blog about my life. So I remember things. This blog has 11 years of memories stored in it. So far.)

The vacation was in September 2011, a trip around Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I’d finished up my last cherry drying contract before my wasband arrived. I was living in my RV, as usual, which was parked across the street from the last orchard on my contract, a beautiful and quiet place overlooking Squilchuck Canyon. The plan was to take a nice, leisurely drive west and hop a ferry to the Peninsula, then circumnavigate it. I think my wasband took a whole week off from work to do it.

This wasn’t my wasband’s first trip to Washington that summer. He came twice.

As usual, he came for my birthday — which I really wish he didn’t do. Back in those days, my summers were usually spent at my computer, revising one book or another. That year, I’d been working on my Mac OS X 10.7 book, which had a very tight deadline. For the previous editions, I’d worked closely with my editors to get the book in Apple stores on the date the OS was released. That quick publication, which required intense, often 10- or 12-hour days at my desk, was partially responsible for the book’s good sales figures. It didn’t matter if my birthday or a visit from a friend or loved one happened when the deadline was looming: I had to work until I was finished.

My wasband didn’t seem to understand this and always scheduled a visit for my birthday. It caused a lot of stress. He seemed to think that my birthday was a special day that required his attendance. I considered it just another day in my life, one that often required me to work. That’s part of the life of a freelancer: you work when there’s work and you play when there isn’t work.

In the summer of 2011, I managed to finish the book before he went home and we had some time together. But still, I clearly recall being in Leavenworth with him, just walking around the shops, when a panicky call came from my editor. I can’t remember the details, but it required me to get back to my trailer, which was an hour’s drive away, and email or ftp him a file for the printer. It couldn’t wait — the book was going to press and that file was absolutely needed. So we hurried to the truck and rushed back, thus pretty much ruining what should have been a stress-free day.

My wasband returned in September for our Olympic Peninsula trip. You can read about the first three days starting here. It was a great trip, possibly one of my Top 10. It was like the old days, when we did long road trips together: Seattle to San Francisco, the Grand Circle, Death Valley and Las Vegas, Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway by motorcycle. We explored back roads, did the tourist thing, hiked, picnicked with cheese and crackers at roadside stops, photographed the scenery, and ate all kinds of foods. We stayed in great places and crappy places. Not everything was perfect, but what trip is?

On the second day, we took a ferry to Victoria, B.C.

When the trip was over, he headed home to Arizona without me. He had to get back to work, back to a job he hated, working for a micromanaging boss who’d fire him less than eight months later — even after I took him and his wife on a dinner trip by helicopter in an attempt to help my wasband score points.

Based on blog posts, it looks as if I headed back to Arizona with my helicopter in early October. Not sure why I stayed so long, but there must have been a good reason. I suspect I drove the RV back before that, but I don’t have any blog posts with details and my calendar doesn’t go back that far.

Yes, I made two trips to and from Washington each year — once to move my RV and again to move my helicopter. My wasband made the RV trip with me once in six years, taking a vacation through several national parks on the way home. I think he made the helicopter trip with me twice. It was a lot of traveling. The RV move was particularly stressful and lonely, especially if the weather turned bad along the way.

When I got back to Arizona, I started noticing a change in my wasband. He was cold and distant and never seemed happy. I assumed it was because of his job. His roommate had moved out of the Phoenix condo and I moved in. We fixed the place up nicely, with new furniture and my office set up in the guest room. Now we could spend more time together without his roommate criticizing half the things I did or said. But things just weren’t quite right.

It wasn’t until much later that I’d discover he’d been emailing an old friend back in New York that autumn about how I was “driving him crazy.” He never did tell me. I never knew that I was the cause of his unhappiness — even after visiting a marriage counsellor (at his request). I did know that he was making me miserable.

Later, at his mother’s 90th birthday party in September 2012, a few months after he’d ended our marriage with a phone call on my birthday — no visit that year! — as he was introducing the desperate old woman he’d replaced me with to his family and friends, he told a mutual friend that he was divorcing me because I hadn’t told him I loved him when he came to visit me on my birthday in 2011.

Draw your own conclusions. I did.

Anyway, the blog post I published on this date back in 2011 represents one of the last few times I was happy with my wasband. When the man I’d fallen in love with 28 years before returned to do something we loved to do together: explore new places and see new things.

I miss that guy.