WDM, IA - He Steers and I Drive

Breakfast out - at Panera. Just a nice relaxing way to start the day: classical music, the newspaper, a hot cup of coffee, a bearclaw, the hum of others in meetings, chatting or on their computer. And, did I mention the bearclaw? Most mornings we have shredded wheat with a teaspoon of wheat germ, a teaspoon of ground flax seed, cranberries and skim milk mixed with soy milk. Sounds pretty plain, doesn’t it? But I look forward to it every morning. However, it’s not so exciting that we don’t want a little change every now and again. We like to eat breakfast out once a week and today it was at Panera.

We leave September 22 for our annual winter journey. Only 24 days from now.

I’ve got most of our winter travels planned out. Am I anal? Just ask anyone with whom I’ve worked. They will tell you, a job knowing the rules and policies, collecting compliance paperwork and reviewing trades was tailor made for me. And, I approach our winter travels much the same way:

        I want to know what to see in the areas that we find ourselves - don’t want to miss a thing - I’m 65 and only have so many years left to explore and learn

        I want to know where we are going to stay each evening - I surely don’t want to find us at 5:00 in the evening looking at a rest stop and wondering where we are going to spend the night. That’s not so hard in a 15’ vehicle but we’ve got a 35’ RV with a Jeep attached. Little more difficult to find a safe spot to park this baby.

        I don’t want the our travels to cost a fortune. Spending a fortune this year and staying home next is not my choice. We try to keep our nightly campground fees fairly low. Everyone asks about our gas costs when we tell them we have a motorhome and compares that to what it would cost them to drive a car. No one asks about our nightly fees nor about our food cost which are so much lower than their hotel and restaurant costs.

For our winter trip this year, I’ve got a 5-page itinerary listing where we will stay and for how long, what we will see, how many miles between stops and how much it will cost per night. Do I have reserves going out to May 8th? What do you think? Actually, we want to spend April in San Francisco and there are not too many decent campgrounds there so we want to know that we’re staying where we want. With that date and place in mind, I had to back-fill all the other places we wanted to stay with the dates.

Gary laughs and repeats the old RV joke about how he steers and I drive.