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!

[Images above: on the left, The Missus’s rolling log of places and dates we visited (and, often, places where we ate); on the right, our fitfully maintained log of the odometer readings at various locations along the way. (Note that the latter covers two time spans: one for each of the cars we’ve made the trip in so far.) The term “Grand Adventure” is entirely The Missus’s.]

We got to The Stepson’s place in Las Vegas more or less on schedule: Wednesday, December 15, 2021, at around 4:45 PM. I can’t say we were delighted that morning to pull out of the resort in Sedona, Arizona — we’d loved it there — but, again, at least we were more or less on schedule.

If you do the math, then, you’ll know that we’ve now been here for four nights. At some point in the next few hours, I am assured, we’ll be heading out to pick up a tree for the living-room corner. And then, who knows, we’ll link hands and sing a chorus or two of O Tannenbaum, or perhaps just cue up a Die Hard movie. (We have already watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, so that’s out of our system for now.)

Hope you’ve all been able to survive recent months with a minimum of anguish and heartbreak. The gods know there’s plenty of both out there — no reason at all why you should be adding to the pile.

Now getting ready to look ahead to Road Trip (excuse me — I mean Grand Adventure) 2022… because somehow, we have to get both ourselves and the car back across the country to get on with the rest of our lives! And in the meantime, I’ll try here to fill in some of the gaps as we made our way to the Nevada desert…

We now have a definite must-leave-by date: next Friday, July 30 — that is, the day our hosts leave for a long-planned (and frankly, long-desperate-for) five-day drive to Michigan and back. Our intention, though, is to leave a couple-three-four days before that, to give them some time to tie up some loose ends here with their home and business.

But, well… 2021, right? The Year of Overturned Schedules. (And we thought 2020 was bad: bwaa-ha-ha!) So, not counting any chickens. We’ll just have to see.

You may be wondering what’s going on with us. Understandable: we ourselves don’t really know! I can tell you we still are at The Stepdaughter’s House o’ Canines, and will be here at least through tomorrow night. We still have two unanswered questions in the short term:

• The Missus’s health: she had a slight fever over the last few days — I mean, really slight: about one degree higher than normal. But it worried her enough that she considered getting a COVID test. And by the time she woke up this morning, it had fallen back down into her normal range. There’s also something like a general malaise going on; she’s been spending the last couple days in bed until dinnertime, something to do with a scratchy throat. We think it might be related to the time spent around big, shedding dogs.
• We still haven’t confirmed our arrival date with The Jacksonville Sister-in-Law. It’s only about a four-hour drive, but even so, we need to be sure she’s ready for us!

At this point, all I know for sure is that we have reservations to take The Stepdaughter and Stepson-in-Law to dinner tomorrow night. On the other hand, we had reservations tonight, at a different restaurant, but have chosen to order dinner in, instead.

So, as the magic 8-Ball says: Answer hazy; try again later!

Postscript, the next day: Took The Missus today to a local “urgent care” facility. (There was no “urgency,” as such; it’s just the way to go for someone from out-of-town, these days, when experiencing some kind of respiratory problem. A good clinic, like the one we visited, even does its own X-rays and such right then and there.) They gave her a COVID-19 swab test, and we’ll know the results within another couple days. But the medical staff were not terribly worried by what they could find then and there, especially since her symptoms have abated quite a bit — but also because there’s something of a cold epidemic going on around here. Huge sigh of relief. She’ll stay more or less confined upstairs until the test results prove conclusive. And then we’ll try to make sense of the schedule, minus a week’s progress.