Jeez, I just keep getting worse and worse at this blogging thing. Well, this time my excuse is that we went on a little trip. It was a family visit trip. We started with John in Citrus Springs, FL. John's wife was my wife's aunt so the family relationship is pretty distant but we both really like John so we are willing to drive 2,000+ miles to visit him. He is in kind of a high point in Florida's geography so the hurricanes kind of give him a miss. He got some rain from Ian but that was about it. Of course we'd gone on before all that.
Our second stop was on the outskirts of Little Rock, AR. Our son left his long time home in San Diego and moved to Little Rock. Yeah, seems kind of strange to us too but they seem to be happy there. It was certainly financially a good deal: they sold their small house outside of San Diego and were able to pay cash for a larger and nicer place in Little Rock so no mortgage payments for them! Not only that but they are on a little private lake. What's not to like?
So, having stopped at one child's new house (well, if a 50 year old can be called a child!), of course our next stop would be his sister's new house outside of Oklahoma City. Yep, both kids decided to move in the same year! Well, anyway, they are both just off I-40!
Number 1 daughter had lived in Las Vegas for a number of years but decided to move to Austin, TX a couple years ago. She finally figured out that she had moved into basically a retirement community and wasn't happy. She works for a company that supplies equipment to the building industry and has several customers in the Oklahoma City area and decided that she liked the area and moved there. So we went to OKC. Again she found a nice little house. It is small but plenty big for her and her cat.
So that was about 3 weeks of September and almost 5,000 miles on our 2008 F250. The truck is really a pleasure to drive and cruising at something just under 70 mph gives us just under 20mpg. The downside would be that it is diesel which was somewhere between $4.20 and $5.00 all across the country. And those were the cheaper place; no big truck stops for us!
We took the dog so were looking for dog-friendly motels. We like a king-sized bed and my wife prefers a large room so finding places to stay was always fun but she does it all so I can't really complain. There would be a problem with cleaning sometimes. She showered one morning then just wandered around barefoot in the room for a couple of hours. This is what her feet looked like after just hanging around in the room. Not good!
Dog-friendly often means a hard surface floor rather than carpet. Apparently the cleaning staff doesn't always know about mopping floors.
We also managed to find a couple of places with rooms on the second floor. In one of those places my wife was going up the stairs (outside) with the dog and the dog managed to trip her and make her fall. So she got a huge bruise on her butt AND hurt her right foot. Well, since she had that operation on her left foot, having the right foot injured as well did not make for speedy walking. She is ok and both feet are healing but it didn't make life any happier.
We had hoped to visit friends in Colorado Springs on the way home but with the foot injury we decided we just needed to get home. I must say we were both really happy to get home. It seemed like a much longer trip than it really was!
So that's what I've been up to for the last month. I hope you were having fun as well. Take care and keep washing those hands.
