The oven is toast

The toaster oven committed suicide sometime yesterday.
We were rolling down the road, oblivious to her pain, when she must have jumped off the countertop and plunged that long drop to the floor of the trailer.
We didn’t hear a thing, just kept motoring down the highway and not until our lunch stop, when we opened the door to find her in pieces, did we realize what she had done.
We knew she had been suffering, since after a couple of earlier mishaps when we found her on the floor, somewhat mangled. She no longer toasted, only roasted, because her selection dial had taken a pounding some kilometres down the road, and just the other night we had to wait and wait and wait for her to produce enough heat to cook our bacon.
But we have to accept responsibility here as well. She counted on us to lift her gently off the counter and place her in a safe location on the floor, a chore we sometimes forgot as we packed up to hit the road.
The toaster oven isn’t the only thing to have taken a 25,000-kilometre pounding. Harley, hanging on to the back of the truck for all that distance, is showing some signs of wear and tear. Ian popped both the front and back windows out of the trailer back in Florida, then lined the cavities with a sort of plumbers putty before putting the windows back in place, all in an effort to keep us dry inside.
That was quite some time ago and leaks hadn’t been an issue. Of course, we hadn’t experienced more than a few showers either, that is until a day’s drive through Northern California plagued by downpours.
The front window, taking the force of the rain, had the nerve to leak, just a little, onto the couch cushions.
That window is now on Ian’s Pender honey-do list.
We’ll also pay some needed attention to the truck when we get home, primarily the windshield. A stone was thrown into it somewhere in the Fraser canyon on our first day out, straight into the front window, leaving the telltale mark. Not until Savannah, Ga. did the horizontal crack straight across Vicki’s passenger view start to appear.
There are other stone chips, too many to count now, eager to horn in on the action so a windshield replacement is also on Ian’s list.
Then, of course, there’s the dream list of what we’d like to do with Harley before our next outing. A sliding shelf, perhaps, for that new toaster oven on the wish list. Stronger fasteners for the hanging shoe bag we put inside the front door just last week.
All in all, there isn’t much that needs to be taken care of before the next trip. But we’ll sit around on rainy evenings at home, with a fire roaring in the stove, planning and scheming on when and how we can get away. And through it all, we’ll have more than a million memories to fuel our plans.