The journal has been strangely silent because it’s been a long, cold winter here in Wisconsin with no travel. As noted in the What’s New pages, in October Marc had a job injury which tore loose two of the three muscles holding his rotator cuff in his right shoulder. Not only extremely painful, it was debilitating. We were fortunate to finally find a surgeon who thought it repairable so Marc had surgery on January 10^th. The prognosis is looking very good and although still in pain, Marc is able to move his arm and is gaining strength with twice-weekly physical therapy sessions. There is little doubt this will be a lifelong injury however, which will affect his motor abilities, his dexterity, and his ability to build things like before. All in all, life changing in its way.

Meanwhile on the job front, this project is just about wrapped up. We expect to leave here by the first part of June at the latest and maybe even earlier. We’ve been in evolution the past couple years regarding our lifestyle and wanted to share with you some thoughts and conclusions we’ve arrived at recently.

Second is our need to continue working. Neither one of us is eligible for any retirement so there is no going out on a silver spoon for this couple. The biggest drawback to being able to retire, for us, is the medical insurance issue. Due to pre-existing conditions, an individual policy is prohibitively expensive for us and one we simply can’t afford. Looking at this realistically we probably don’t have much choice but to retain career level employment with full benefits until age 65 when we can get Medicare.

Third on the list is the sharply rising cost of everything but particularly fuel. If we were to hopscotch the country at will it wouldn’t take long to eat through thousands of dollars in one big hurry. Although we have never been the type of RVer to travel willy-nilly all over the country, the sobering fact is that it is just getting too expensive to drag our big RV along on every trip. Thus, you will likely see many more travel log episodes related to motorcycle travel than to RVing. For what it costs to run the RV for one day in fuel we can not only ride the bike an equivalent distance, but we can spend $20 on food and about $75 for a motel if we decide not to tent camp. The 45 mpg bike mileage versus the 7-8 mpg RV mileage is a no-brainer in today’s economy. And we actually enjoy the bike travel more so it is not viewed as a loss in our book.

Adding these three things together brought us to the conclusion that we needed to think more about entertainment opportunities closer to where we really want to be. Sure, we’d love to see the whole country but realistically it just isn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t call this "settling down" but it is frankly, probably the first step in that direction. We really have no desire for a standard type home which would be costly and would tie us into making large mortgage, tax and insurance payments so we are opting for something much simpler.

We have ordered a new park model trailer which we will be setting up in our favorite RV park in Coos Bay, Oregon. We view it as a vacation and weekend home—a chance to get out of the RV and in a different location; a location we know we enjoy with activities that are some of our favorites. The thought is that it will be there for eventual part-year living while we still maintain ownership of our RV and our lot in Yuma. As we age it may get to where we can only go back and forth between the two locations with the seasons and the RV will remain stationary on the Yuma lot. Who knows?