Well…
It’s been more than a year since my last post.
Lots of things have happened since then, and not all of them had something to do with travel.
Toward the end of 2022, my husband DID accompany me somewhere “different.” We went to Costa Rica for a week in mid-November. We had a great time, but the weather was not as we (nor Costa Ricans) thought it would be. The infinity pool at the lovely boutique hotel we stayed in was too cold for me, and even their hot tub didn’t heat up to my preference. We visited the southern part of Costa Rica, and did not visit the jungle -- that will be another trip. Maybe with the whole family!
We spent Christmas 2022 in Utah with that crew and the California crew. Then, at the end of January 2023, all of our kids and grandkids (one family unexpected) converged at our home in Wyoming to celebrate my husband’s 70th birthday. Such a great visit!!! The three oldest grandkids (all almost age 5 at that time) tried skiing, even though it was wickedly cold. For the first time in a long while, my husband and I were able to ski together with our three grown kids. Our youngest grandson became quite sick and was diagnosed with bilateral ear infections. Luckily, he had two doses of antibiotics before the family flew back to New Hampshire. Our California crew left to fly home a couple of days later. Since I’m a Public Health Nurse fixated on the COVID-19 pandemic, I insisted that my husband and I test: he was positive; I was negative and stayed that way thanks to masks and trying to stay away from one other. I hated having to tell the whole family to be vigilant, but, amazingly, no one else contracted it, even though we had 13 people in our 2,600 sq.ft. house for a week.
Throughout the rest of 2023, we traveled to visit family -- or traveled WITH them. In early April, we joined our New Hampshire crew in Puerto Rico with the other grandparents for a wonderful week of warm weather, while snow still covered the ground at home. Then, another knee replacement for my husband curtailed travel until June, when we traveled to Maine to visit his family, joined by our New Hampshire crew.
After our return from Maine, we prepared for a trip in our camper to join the California crew way up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Amazing trip to a place we’ve never seen! Back south to stay with the Utah crew on both ends of a short trip to California to attend our son’s graduation from his fellowship. As we were returning to Utah, we heard that we had been exposed to COVID-19 at a super-spreader event that affected our California kids and grandkids and most of the colleagues of our son and daughter-in-law. We wore masks at the home of our Utah crew, left the next morning to travel in the camper to the foothills of the Wind River Range of Wyoming to join camping friends after each of us tested COVID-negative four times. We headed back home on the 4th of July, and I tested positive for COVID -- luckily, no one else was affected, including my husband.
We made trips to Utah and California, and those crews traveled to visit us in Wyoming. I had flown to California to help that crew as they packed up their house in the Bay area to move to SoCal, then flew back home with my two grandsons (ages 5 and 2). Trauma for my younger grandson, because of traveling with MiMa and not Mama -- great help from big brother! -- but we survived and had loads of fun after arriving in Wyoming. Their parents and the Utah crew joined us My brother and his wife joined us from Michigan in early August, only the second from my family of eight (plus their 13 kid) to visit us here. I traveled to Utah for a few days with my grandson and was there for his first day of kindergarten, and then flew to visit the New Hampshire crew and to be there for my grand-daughter’s first day of kindergarten. My husband did not accompany me on these trips because he had been asked to return to work (a whole ‘nother story - and I can’t give him a hard time, because I had done it, too).
We traveled to visit the California crew in November, and attended Grandparents Day at our grandson’s school. We had been in SoCal 10 years before for the wedding of our son and his fiancée at a venue north of Los Angeles, but this time we enjoyed many places further down the Pacific Coast that neither of us had ever seen. We were on our own for Christmas, but joined our Utah crew for New Year’s Eve.
Then came 2024.
First was a sudden trip for me to Utah to help the crew there when our daughter ended up in the hospital with a crazy lung infection. Her father couldn’t come with me because of work. He intended to join a few days later, as we were expecting to stay with our grandson while our daughter and son-in-law took a trip to warm weather to celebrate his 40th birthday. Not only were they unable to go because of her illness, but the weather was too bad for driving from Wyoming to Utah -- we called him to say “stay home.” Then, I got to drive home alone on a lull day between snowstorms.
In February, we attended a celebration of life for an old friend in Missouri, joining her surviving husband, children, grandchildren, and many friends. It was a poignant reminder for us of our own mortality.
Back in Wyoming, I finally had a chance to get out on the slopes, only to catch a ski in snow as sticky as marshmallow-fluff for a slow, twisting fall that tore a ligament of my left knee joint. Three months in a brace. We had trips to New Hampshire in February and to California in March planned, due to impending shoulder replacement surgery for me in mid-April that was going to preclude travel for awhile. We went anyway -- I just conceded to being pushed in a wheelchair in the airports. I had more than a month of a knee brace overlapping with a shoulder immobilizer after I had that surgery. Everywhere I went people thought I’d been hit by a truck.
My travel for three months was relegated to trips from my house to PT and back, or to Utah for shoulder surgery follow-up visits. In early June, I was able to walk without any kind of knee splint. In early July, I was relieved of the shoulder brace. We flew to Maine later in July for a visit with my husband’s family, which our New Hampshire crew also attended. Lovely weather, unlike the constant rain during our visit the previous summer. My husband’s 95-year-old father, who had flown on his own all the way from California to Maine, surprised us by asking all of his children and their partners to visit Europe with him one more time in September. My husband and I had the trip of a lifetime planned, but decided to incorporate his request into the dates of our travel.
Most of our travel is booked through Salt Lake City airport. It’s a good way to visit frequently with them. We can leave our dog with our Utah crew, and often bring their dog to our house when they travel. In fact, their dog spent 45 days of Summer 2023 at our house, and ours spent more than 30 days at their house.
In early August, my California son and his boys joined me and my Utah grandson while his parents took a long weekend trip to make up for the missed January birthday trip. The dogs stayed home with my husband, who had work days scheduled. I had loads of fun with all the boys, then my Utah grandson drove back to Wyoming with me for a week of what has been dubbed “Grand Camp.” We drove him, two dogs (ours and theirs) back to Utah, where my husband and I embarked on our trip to Europe.
But that major travel event is much too much to include here. Stay tuned!