Travels and travails

Lovely daughter suggested I post about our trip. What should I highlight for week One?

• 1,400 miles to get here. The daily hours traveling: 6, 6, 0 (two nights in Sparks/Reno), 6, 3, 0 (two nights Yuma), 3.
• Got to visit Ralph (Medford), Mike and Mary Ann Reinecke (Lake Havasu City AZ), and met up with friends Tom/Mary, Tom, and Del/Sandy.
• Three casino visits; my start/finish amounts on the slot machines were $10/25, $4/25, and $10/$25. And I only played 10-15 minutes each time.
• We didn't exactly track the price of diesel, but I believe it ranged from $3.62 to $4.17.
• Did I mention Mike's grand entrance into Yuma? I was setting up (preparing to unhook the trailer) and he tripped over a hose bib. Resulted in a major hematoma / blood blister thing, plus gravel dents/scrapes through his pants.
• AND the next morning his Aunt Marilyn passed out in her home, falling and gashing her head. It took a while for me to clean it up before I could see that it needed stitches. Her friend Tom took her in, and the ended up in emergency all day. Of course they wanted to find out why she had passed out ~ Tom said it was the second time in two weeks she had fallen ~ but they didn't find anything. She got eight staples in her scalp!
• After a week of travel, today was laundry! So tomorrow the vacation starts?
  

Camping -- or not

Okay, this one is for N8. I agree that traveling in an RV (trailer, 5th wheel, camper, whatever) is not camping.

Camping requires cold, wet, uncomfortableness (pretend that's a word and move on). Hard ground. No running water, no shower. Did I mentioned hard, lumpy ground? Reconstituted freeze-dried food. Giant slugs (Vancouver Island, great park and activities, but GIANT slugs). Crows getting into the apples left in a bag on the picnic table.

RV'ing is furnace, warm inside when it's cold outside. Or cooler inside when it's hot outside. Regular stocks of food, refrigerator, stove, oven, microwave, toaster oven. Regular bed. Flushing toilet. Water heater. Shower.

Traveling -- or not

People have different definitions of traveling. Some people travel out of town for a day to visit friends. Others might say that's not really traveling, and "real" traveling must involve an airplane, or a boat, or at least an overnight away, or a passport, or a different time zone.

Whatever you call it, I would rather be getting ready for our annual "travel." We were scheduled to leave next week and be gone 5+ weeks. But we aren't mobile enough right now.

But I am taking off a week from work (week of MLK holiday). Mike will have a couple of P.T. appointments, and I have a list of things I need to get done in the trailer and around the house.

Trailer: take the bi-fold shower door out, so we can just use a shower curtain. Maybe wash it (the trailer that is, not the shower door), if we get a half-dry day (oh yeah, I live to climb on top of the fifth wheel!). See if we (I) can secure the new flat screen TV differently/better. Get one of the tail lights working. Make the bed. Put the new license tabs on the plate. maybe even put the cover on the whole thing (we've only had it two years and never used it).

In the house: like usual, general cleaning. Remove and resilicone the master shower edges. Re-grout some of the glass block wall. Oh yes, how could I forget the guest half-bath: M pulled the pedestal sink out of the wall. So I need to take it completely out of the room so I can: remove the lower-half wallpaper (it has separate top and bottom patterns with a border strip in the middle), cut out a section of sheetrock, install a nailer board behind where the pedestal sink will re-attach, re-sheet/mud/texture, while I'm at it install a grab bar in front of the toilet, paint the lower half of the walls, reinstall the sink.

In many ways, that's more of a vacation to me than driving 300 miles a day for 4 days so I can lull around for a few weeks. But I will miss the sun, and our friends, and a chance to ride my bike everyday : (

Gotta go. One of the light bulbs over me needs to be replaced, which reminds me that one of the outside garage lights went out yesterday too!

I'm so glad I'm mobile, even if I'm not on the road.

Plan B for vacationing

At this point, Mike and I were very tentative for making a trip south. He has not had the "Synvisc" shot yet. I have been reading on-line, and I have more information which the doctor's office had not told us: I see that he will have three shots, one week apart.

So the math does not work out for us to leave and join our friends in sunny Southern California: even if he were to get the first shot on Monday or Tuesday, his third shot would be about the day we are supposed to leave. And we don't even know if the med will work for him. He is in the wheelchair most of the time right now. If he was full-time on the walker, like he was a month ago, I would say we could still go.

Our plan B is to cancel this trip, and maybe take off one week a month for the next five months for more local trips in the fifth wheel (assuming he is mobile!).