Making Plans

Rehab was great but I still can't do my entire time on the bike. The rest of the routine is fine. My plan is to be with mom today then hit the little hidden garden tomorrow. Maybe, just maybe, I will be able to do a bit more. We will see.

Building stamina is the ultimate goal.

Sunday, we will be actually plotting our road trip in May. So many people to visit and so many places we want to see one more time. Each trip, we often wonder if it will be my last one before needing lungs or too ill to travel. As we are now older, we are going to remember that we can no longer drive twelve hours a day for a few days to get quicker to the center of the country.

Our goals will be to visit British Don in his new digs in Oklahoma City, the park in Arkansas where one can search for diamonds, the bourbon trail for Michael to get the last stamp on our passports for our t-shirts, our friends in southern Ohio, my uncle and his wife's graves in Chattanooga, Michael's mom and sister in Knoxville, my friend Christien in Raleigh and my brother and his wife in New Mexico. But, we are planning to meet British Don in Charleston then drive together to Savannah before dropping him at an airport as we begin to head west along the southern border to my brother's home in central New Mexico.

It should take around three weeks.

The challenge of the trip is in the preparation: arranging for the mail, bills, watering the garden, cancelling oxygen deliveries, cancelling housekeepers, packing then repacking, ordering medications, making all the hotel reservations and millions of details. Very stressful and each trip I wonder if it is worth it all but then when we pull out of the driveway before dawn, we are free. No worries. No doctors. Nowhere we have to be. The vacation really begins.

We stay primarily at Hampton Inns as they have great locations, good prices, delicious free breakfasts and clean bedspreads when they change the sheets. In our routine, we wipe down everything in the room with Clorox Wipes, especially the TV remote. Light switches to toilet flusher are all cleaned. Just takes a minute or two as we are now pros at wiping down a room.

The excitement begins!