Parowan, UT 5-11-2018

Hi everyone!  We are on the road!  More on this below.

Leaving the homestead for 3 weeks became complicated, as it often does.  As my surgeon said one time, “We make plans.  God laughs.”  This time, as we prepared to leave, I walked out onto the back patio and there I found about a million and a half crickets.  Some were sneaking through tiny holes into our kitchen and other rooms.  Fortunately, they were all dead because we have a pest control company that comes to our house each month.  But seriously… a bazillion bugs?  It completely freaked me out.  “The Invasion Of The Crickets.”  The pest control company came out and sprayed, etc. and I was informed of “Glue Boards.”  They are sticky boards about a foot long and you line them up along the doorways or anywhere else where the bugs are getting inside.  So, in addition to all of the orchestration that is involved in leaving the homestead, we had to become “The Bug Busters.”

As some of you know, the new 2015 Fleetwood Bounder that we acquired turned out to be a bust.  Absolutely everything that could be wrong with it was wrong with it.  For the 12 months we had use of it to travel, it was in the shop for 5.  In the end, we won a lemon law litigation suit against Fleetwood and dumped it.  Still, we asked ourselves if we thought that, at our age, one more beast could possibly be in our lives or if we should hang it up.  We decided to take one more shot at it.  Well, you know how dealerships can be.  Every model you walk through has all kinds of features you don’t want and lacks features that you want.  So we said, “Fuck it.  Let’s just order exactly what we want and have it built.”  We did that and decided to pick it up at the factory.  Drive to Forest City, Iowa in the Jeep?  Not exactly a “freeway flyer,” to be sure.  Like driving a brick.  Plus it has to be loaded with all of our “stuff.”  You know, linens, towels, a few pots and pans, the tow package, secondary brake system.  Not to mention rain and cold weather gear and a tool box.  Are we too old for this?  Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’re not. 

So here we are on the first leg of the journey.  We are in Parowan, Utah, driving a Jeep stuffed to the gills with supplies like sheets, towels and potato chips and of course a cooler of martini fixins.’  We are settled in at our first hotel, sipping a cocktail and preparing to walk to the restaurant for a Chinese dinner.

More to come as we cross the country to Forest City, Iowa!