As you probably know via other channels, The Missus and I eventually — in late 2022 — completed our meandering back-and-forth across the country. I apologize if you’ve been hanging in suspense since the last post, now almost two years old!

It’s hard to say exactly why I stopped updating this travelogue, aside from the exhaustion of travel itself. Post-Las Vegas, we spent the month of June tooling around the Grand Canyon and California (Joshua Tree, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Luis Obispo, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe, Petaluma, Eureka and the redwoods). From there, we pretty much headed east without too much dawdling (Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne WY, etc., all the way through to Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia). We finally landed back in North Florida in mid-August, nominally staying with family there until the first week of October… and beyond.

(I say “nominally” because The Missus became very sick — not with COVID, thank the gods, but still — for a couple weeks, starting just a few days after we arrived in Jacksonville. And I headed off to North Carolina that first week of October to scout out the area for a place where we could comfortably spend our retired years more or less at a merciful standstill.)

Anyway, it turns out that my “johnesimpson.com” Internet domain is starting to run out of space. Because I continue to need more space for my main blog, called Running After My Hat, I am going to be shuttering this In Our Own Way section of that domain (as well as a handful of other test/experimental blogs I’ve set up in the neighborhood since 2008).

Translation: if you want to hang onto the record of the first part of our trip, you’ll need to figure out some way to do that. (I still haven’t made up my own mind about how to do it for myself — probably just save copies of the email messages which subscribers received.)

The timeline for the shutdown is fuzzy, but I expect I’ll do that sometime in May, possibly June. I’ll post one more update here in the meantime, just as a next-to-the-last-minute notice. And then In Our Own Way will — like its two principal characters — will head for the sunset!

Thanks so much for reading!

We pulled out of the hotel parking lot in Tallahassee yesterday at around 2:00 pm. It felt not very much like a triumphant departure — we were (are) both too tired to celebrate, what with a six-plus-hours drive still ahead of us. But we did bump fists, so that counts, right?

(Well, technically we bumped fists twice. I’ve never mastered the art of the cool-guy fist bump. When The Missus first raised her fist, her eyebrows raised and face all expectant, I got the right idea — but with poor brain/fist coordination, all I managed was a weak, upside-down response. “Damn it,” I thought, flipped the fist around, and successfully pulled off Try #2.)

Instead of the faster –but higher-pressure — highway route, we opted for “the back way,’ at least to start out. (I’d even mapped out an entirely “back way” to South(ish) Florida… but to follow through on that alternative, we’d have to have left by noon. No way!) It drizzled a bit, but by the time we stopped for a fast-food mid-afternoon bite to eat, it was obvious we’d have to switch to the all-highways option…

This being Central Florida, the serious rain started a few minutes later. And continued, almost whiting-out the way forward, until we finally pulled off at the Stuart exit of the Florida Turnpike, seven-and-a-half hours after departure.

Whew!

Neither of us feels any real emotional connection to Tallahassee itself anymore. Oh, The Missus still has a handful of friends in town, but she’s pretty unapologetically blunt: once “the kids” left town to live hours away, she was pretty much done with it. I have one friend nearby, whom I know mostly from Facebook; I’ve had lunch with him a couple times, and will do so again next Thursday, but that’s it. All our friends from years ago have been gone (one way or another) for years — decades, even. And although we both liked and were friendly with people we worked with, those “friendships” went more or less by the board in 2020. Since we retired, we hear from “work” pretty much only when something has gone wrong that no one else knows how to fix (haha).

Still, a few elements of Tallahassee will linger in our heads after we leave. I can imagine wanting to reexperience a few of them, if/when we come back to town for favorite doctors’ appointments or whatever — favorite local (non-chain) restaurants, for example. And it’ll be interesting to see what comes of some still-in-the-works construction projects: big hotel/shopping districts, various roadways both improved and flat-out new, parks, and so on.

A couple nights ago, we (with The Stepson) went to one of favorite newer restaurants, Backwoods Crossing. It’s out on the eastern side of town, near the interstate, and when we left, although it was around 9pm and hence after dark, we decided to drive through the neighborhood where our house was. (Well, where it still is, but you know what I mean.) A strange experience… We recognized our old neighbors’ cars and so on; the house itself — we don’t know anything about the current owners — had two cars in the driveway, and absolutely no lights on. (?) Strange, like I said… but probably not the last time we’ll feel that way. For the upcoming trip, The Missus has been busily looking up the street addresses of all the houses she lived in over the past 50-60 years because she wants to drive by them, too. She has no current emotional connection to them, of course; they’re just symbols of emotional connections gone by. I suspect we’ll both come to think of Tallahassee that way.