This week I was lucky enough to be invited to provide HEALWA instruction to school nurses in the North Central Educational Service District in Washington State. This meant a three-day road trip to Moses Lake, Wenatchee, and Omak, teaching one-hour HEALWA workshops at each site.

There’s a fair bit of planning that goes into these workshops. For this marathon, I needed:

• a rental car that could manage in a small amount of snow if necessary;
• a cheap-but-not-too-cheap hotel at the halfway point;
• a head count for each session so I could prepare an appropriate number of evaluations and cheat sheets;
• a sense of the technology available at each site (reliable Internet access isn’t always a given);
• and of course, all my supplies, i.e. gluten-free food, clothes, reading material, etc.

With all that in mind, I don’t decide to take these trips lightly.

Day One went well in Moses Lake – I arrived safely and without getting lost, and the workshop went over very well with positive feedback. Things took a bit of a turn once I left for my hotel in Wenatchee. One minute it was a gray drizzly day, and the next, it was a complete whiteout and I wasn’t able to see more than two cars ahead of me. I was told my rental car had all-season tires, but I didn’t trust that they would hold up in more than a light dusting of snow. It was a tense 50-minute drive on an unfamiliar route to Wenatchee, but once I made it to town, the weather miraculously cleared up.

After my run-in with the surprise snow event, I spent the rest of the evening in my hotel room reviewing the weather forecasts for the next few days. Omak is farther north than Wenatchee, and traditionally, the northern part of the Inland Northwest gets the most snow. If there was some snow in Wenatchee, there was definitely snow in Omak. In fact, there was probably more snow in Omak. To my disappointment, the weather reports confirmed this.

Based on this information, I decided to cancel my workshop in Omak on Day Three. Better safe than sorry, I thought. And luckily, my contact at the ESD who had arranged everything agreed with me. So my workshop in Wenatchee on Day Two was my last session for the trip.

I head back to Spokane this afternoon, and I’m looking forward to getting home. I’m pleased that I was able to complete two of my workshops, so I don’t feel like this trip was a complete waste of time and money. My biggest takeaway from this experience? Save the road trips for the summer.