Friday, January 23, 2026 – Day 528

Friday, January 23, 2026

Good morning, everyone.
Be safe out there—it is seriously cold.

Following my one year and done at WIU, I returned home in the summer of 1979 to a fair amount of well-deserved stink eye from my mom. She was always the bad cop. Like any good parent, she asked the question that hung in the air every day:

What are you going to do with your life?

I was 20 years old, and I had no answer.

So we all did what families often do—we ignored the elephant in the room and went through the motions that summer. Then August rolled around. Another school year was starting for everyone else… but not for Tim and me. The question could no longer be avoided.

“What are you going to do?”

The answer came out simple and bold—probably because it wasn’t thought through very well:

“We’re going to Portland, Oregon.”

My roommate Phil from WIU—who lived in Western Springs and also wasn’t invited back to college—asked if Tim and I wanted to go. His dad was relocating to Portland for work, and one of the family cars needed to make the trip. The three of us would drive it out.

Phil pulled up to the house, we tossed a couple of suitcases full of clothes into the car, and off we went. There was a tearful goodbye in the driveway—my mom doing her best to hold it together while probably wondering how this plan passed for adulthood. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. All we knew was that transportation and lodging were covered, and we’d have a place to stay when we arrived.

What other questions really needed to be asked?

We shared the driving and loosely planned to cover about 300 miles a day, which would get us to Portland in roughly a week. Somewhere along the way, that plan quietly unraveled. Days started later. Miles got shorter. And before we knew it, this “week-long drive” was turning into a ten-day adventure and headed for two weeks.

I didn’t think much of it at the time—I wasn’t there when Phil received the original instructions or the arrival commitment. We were just enjoying the drive west, the freedom, and the feeling that something new was beginning.

We stayed almost exclusively at Howard Johnson Motor Lodges—the ones with the bright orange roofs you could spot from the highway. Each night followed the same rhythm: check in, drop our bags, lounge by the pool, stretch the evening as long as possible, then stumble to bed well past midnight. Sleeping late became the norm, which meant we didn’t hit the road until around 11:00 a.m. After five or six hours of driving, boredom and fatigue would set in, and we’d call it a day.

Nebraska felt endless. The drive across that state alone seemed to take a full week. Every 50 miles or so, you crossed the Platte River—or at least it felt that way. The scenery barely changed, and neither did our sense of urgency. We weren’t breaking any land-speed records on our way to Oregon.

That is… until one phone call.

Phil talked with his dad, and whatever was said during that conversation instantly transformed our leisurely, pool-side, orange-roofed road trip into a mission with a single objective:

Get. To. Portland.

And we did. We picked up the pace and arrived at the new Foltz home, where we were welcomed in and given a place to stay. However… this was only temporary housing for the WIU dropouts. Wait—we’re not staying here while we get settled?
We need jobs immediately?
How exactly is this supposed to work?

We had one week to get our act together—find a place to live and find jobs. As it turned out, finding a place to live wasn’t too difficult. Finding a job that paid enough to live on? That was another story. My résumé included: cashier/stockboy at a liquor store, one summer as a construction laborer, no college degree… but I did have an A in scuba diving.

What exactly did I have to offer?

Welcome to adulthood!

Stick around—I’ll tell you what happened tomorrow.

Have a great Friday. Stay warm and safe.
Love you guys! ❤️

Photos of when my parents came out for a weekend visit. Ignore the name order written on the Polaroid. It’s L-R Phil, Tim, Andy