Galvin crop

Our mission, which we readily accepted, didn’t seem particularly impossible.

Skedaddle to Bandon for a quick getaway — eat some seafood, stroll the beach and commune with the ocean, reconnect with (fairly) clean air, wear a jacket, enjoy a good book — then return the next day reenergized and refreshed.

Yeah, well, so much for that.

Now, to be fair, on the first part of the journey things went pretty much as planned. Swell, even.

Lobster bisque and halibut at The Loft. Prawns at the Fish Company. A break for pasta at Angelo’s Italian (where a local music teacher provided background jazz stylings on his saxophone). Hotel waffles. Really good espresso at the Bandon Coffee Cafe.

Sated, we were.

(Geesh, I’m beginning to sound like Peggy Dover.)

Being children of that other ocean, though, any chance to watch waves coming in from the opposite direction was worth the time it took to get there. Sure, Bandon’s breezy — and not a warm wind, at that. But it was significantly better than the stagnant air we had left behind.

I even ventured out of my comfort zone — to wit, a body at rest, tending to remain at rest — to capture the sun as it descended behind Face Rock. The orange sky, the metallic silver whitecaps, the cold, chiseled, charcoal stone stack — all came sharply into digital focus on the phone, behind the fuzzy digit that was my forefinger.

No worries … this is why God invented Photoshop.

All in all, a day spent in Bandon was good for the soul, with lobster bisque instead of chicken soup. We felt rejuvenated.

And then we started back to the real world.

Oy.

At this point in our lives, we divvy driving duties on any trip of difficulty or distance — and we decide what qualifies as difficult or distant.

While we once criss-crossed the country — North to South, South to North, East to West — driving 28 hours straight, or a week of 10-hour days, now the three hours or so to Bandon is split in the usual manner. She drives through the mountains, I do the flatlands and towns.

Coming home, I was behind the wheel, movin’ right along, footloose and fancy-free … until, that is, we ran smack-dab into a paving project on Route 42.

“LOOSE GRAVEL AHEAD” was the first warning, and the sign-writers weren’t kidding. Stones and cracked asphalt leapt into our undercarriage, announcing themselves with not the ocean sounds that had soothed our jangled nerves the day before, but with the clickity-clack clanging of a coin-counting contraption.

“BE PREPARED TO STOP” we then were told, and they weren’t joking around this time, either.

Frozen in line of eleventyseven billion others as though we were queued up for last-minute Taylor Swift tickets, cars and trucks and trailers stretched for miles and miles and miles (and miles), we took stock of our mini-adventure, listened to Conan O’Brien’s podcast — and wondered whether we had enough gas to get home.

Patience waning, we finally made it unscathed to I-5, just north of the Seven Feathers rest stop, where we’d change drivers and do that thing married couples of a certain age do at a rest stop — steer clear of the germ-spreading bathroom air dryers.

Those 11 miles to Canyonville (That was a Merle Haggard tune, right?) were not enough for the trucker riding our back bumper — who punctuated his perturbance by leaning into a horn that would have complemented the sax player at Angelo’s.

Once he passed us, he blared at us with a trill (could have been a tremolo) and then — and this was truly uncalled for; at least, we hadn’t called for it — briefly veered his big rig back into the slow lane as if to run us off the road.

There barely was enough time to have my life flash before my eyes (or else, my life was even more boring than the cat thinks it is) before we were nothing but near-roadkill in the trucker’s rearview.

Well, that was unpleasant, we decided as we took deep breaths and went about calming our nerves.

That’s when the Low Fuel warning light chimed in. “FEED ME,” it scowled in its best Levi Stubbs baritone.

We made it to the station and, given the trip we’d just had, opted for the assistance of an attendant. The car might not have been completely out of gas at that point, but we were.