At the end of Part I, my husband and I had bought a house in Wyoming near the Teton Mountain Range. The house is at the base of a solitary mountain that doesn’t belong to any named range, but is mostly part of the massive Bridger-Teton National Forest. It took us awhile to actually move here, but move we did, and not to retire. We actually didn’t arrive here full-time until January 1, 2009 and both of us started working full-time in brand-new jobs in our mid-50’s. I continued to work full-time until 2018 (when grandchildren started to come along), and my husband held out until 2020.
For a long time, this new place 3,000 miles away from and 6,000 higher than our old location was travel-in-progress on its own. Besides… we had to stick to PTO allotments. It only required short drives to get where we spent hours hiking, biking, rafting, kayaking, skiing -- you name it! We only took one long vacation together, which was to Melbourne, Australia for a long-overdue visit with our previously-referred-to Australian friends, as their younger son and his fiancée were celebrating their wedding. Otherwise, it was always family-oriented vacations, but at least we had an exotic venue that they could travel TO (though not many did).
The weddings and graduations provided lovely trips, with locations in the Adirondack Mountains of New York; the Green Mountains of Vermont; on a lake that shared shores in northern Vermont and Canada; mid-Atlantic coast; Malibu and a lovely lemon-orchard-turned wedding venue to the east. We then visited our kids and their spouses at the various places they lived: Salt Lake City, Utah; Bay Area California; Boston and Cape Cod. We took family ski trips to Telluride, Colorado; Alta, Snowbird, and Snowbasin in Utah; Lake Tahoe ski areas in California. We got around and had wonderful times.
The first babies arrived in 2018, all between mid-April and the first week of September. Lots of trips to Utah, California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire (where the Boston kids moved when their daughter was a year old). Some trips were both of us, but many more were just my own visits. I also traveled with my daughter and her baby, after she returned to her job that required international travel (we went to Madrid, Spain; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Athens, Greece). My husband and I spent an early Christmas in Utah with all three families -- the babies were still very much babies.
I traveled somewhere almost every month in 2019, and managed to spend time with each family at least three times. All of the families came to our house in Wyoming the week of September into October. We had another early Christmas in Utah with the Utah and California families, then flew to Boston and drove to New Hampshire to spend the week of Christmas with that family.
I flew to Michigan for my mother’s 90 birthday in March 2020. The night before I left came the first of so many shutdowns for COVID-19 pandemic, and I flew home with a scarf over my face. Nobody responsible did any serious traveling outside of families for a long time.
Our Utah family spent six weeks with us in Wyoming at the beginning of the pandemic; our grandson stayed two weeks longer than his parents, and then I drove him home to spend two more weeks with him in Utah. In July, I started working again at Public Health, mostly on calls that I could place remotely. We drove to Lake Tahoe in August for a visit with our California family. We saw the New Hampshire family in October. Then, after a superspreader event at Halloween, I boosted my efforts at Public Health. Crazy long hours for seven months… then interval work until the end of 2022.
In mid-2021, we took delivery of a small motorhome we had ordered before COVID was a thing. To me (though not necessarily to my husband), it was a godsend, because we could travel alone. Our first trip was a long one: Wyoming > New Hampshire > Utah > California (grandchild #4, another graduation, and visit to my husband’s father) > Wyoming (11,000 miles over 3 weeks, end of May to beginning of July). We did some short camping trips with friends in Idaho and Wyoming, drove it to California for a week, and got in one last trip to Flaming Gorge on the WY/UT border before the A’venture Van Camper hibernated for the winter. We spent Christmas that year with our California and Utah families in Utah.
In 2022, we camped with our friends in May at Zion and Bryce National Parks. In July, we headed back to New Hampshire to stay with our son, daughter-in-law, and only granddaughter for three weeks when grandchild #5 was born. She’s the only one who has slept in the A’venture Van with us, while her mom & dad were at the hospital with the new baby. Our return trip took us to visit friends in upstate New York (where we previously lived near the foothills of the Adirondacks), then on to Michigan to visit with my mother for a long weekend. Our daughter and her son (our eldest grandson) flew in from Utah -- he’s the only great-grandchild in our family who has been able to visit her in “real life,” though everyone else video chats with her.
It was at the end of 2022 when I cracked. I was going somewhere different, with or without my husband (I swear he reveled in the restrictions imposed by the pandemic response, which allowed him to justify his hermetic habits). That begins the next part of The Travel Bug story.