
Time to get our retirement clock out of storage!
It’s 3 a.m., Saturday morning on the day after our last day of work. I’m ready and rarin’ to go!
The world is looking rosy and the air is smelling fresh. We don’t need to be anywhere today or tomorrow. For that matter we don’t have to be anywhere — really — for a long time to come. Feels Good.
Our short stop on Monday at Reedsport – on our way East is… (ta da!) – whenever we choose to show up.
Planning
Our Life Unscripted plan from here is pretty simple — get on with RETIREMENT! Throw out the internal alarm clock — we haven’t actually set a wake us up but our bodies have KNOWN to wake up and that’s all it ever really takes, don’t ya know. I’ll delete my iPhone alarm today – the real one that goes off Monday through Friday at 3:40 p.m – to tell me to take myself off the Forest Service Dispatch Board (before they start calling to find out where we are).
We drop our coach at AM Solar on the Aug. 7th — between now and then we’ll chill in the Eugene area at a nondescript RV park near AM SOLAR. The little in-town park we chose has only one redeeming feature — it’s close to AM Solar. There’s a sign on the front desk that warns of night time train traffic. Ya know – I don’t really care. We stayed at Grant River Corps of Engineers campground where 20 high speed freight trains came through every day — 24 hours a day — if we can sleep 30 feet from a train track there we can sleep next to anything. We want something completely different for a few days while we re-learn how to ‘be’ differently than we have for the last 10 months.

Recent shots from MO’s in Florence

Recent shots from MO’s in Florence
We may have some other work done on the coach some place during the run-up to our AM SOLAR appointment. I have some questions to ask of the folks at Guaranty RV. Our leveling system seems to bleed off the levelled effect quite quickly. I’d like to know if that’s something our warranty would cover in part — or not. While we are close to our dealer it’s something worth considering. But the first step is asking questions — so I’ll be doing that in the next few days.

time to head out on the open road
We have been focussed on finishing up affairs here. We have not had or taken time to make ANY plans for Eugene. We’ll be more ‘touristy’ there than we have been in half a year. Of particular interest would be areas EAST of Eugene into the mountains and surrounding areas.
One of the few considerations we gave when deciding what in-town RV park to choose was that it be close a

We both want to get our daily diets back to a more plant based regiment. The produce has been so poor along the coast that we have really relapsed into a largely animal based diet and I don’t like doing that.
We had planned tonight as date night. We had our mandatory reservations at
We’ve eaten there twice before. It’s a nice place for a celebratory meal and we have a lot to celebrate. But as the day wore on we both were happier just staying home. Seeing as I’m the cook we had a simple salad and pasta as it was just as good (or better) than we would have enjoyed eating out — and it just felt cozier.
My plan to sanitize the water system didn’t happen. But that’s ok. The process is simple — I’m sure the dealer did it before we took delivery but we’ve been drawing off the well and not out of the tank and I wanted to be safe. In the next few days we’ll dump the water, refill with weak a chlorine solution, let the tanks set for a couple hours then open faucets, run water, dump water again, and then fill with clean water. Most of the time you’re just sitting around! A simple enough project. 🙂
It will feel good not to have a schedule ahead of me, or projects on my mind, or volunteers to worry about. I’ll have our volunteers on my mind and in my heart but I hope not to worry about them the way we have in the past. There were a few minutes today. And Larry stopped by pick up some firewood I offered him. We talked quite a while — he’s a wonderful example of a caring husband, with a wife with several significant physical challenges. All of these volunteers – Larry and the rest of them are unique and wonderful people but now they are ‘just’ friends and not our responsibility.

we’ve gotten the call of the open road.
Beyond Eugene
Obviously, our immediate destination is Milwaukee and our annual doctor visits. But before leaving for Milwaukee we will travel by car to Stateline NV (Lake Tahoe Area) where we’ll see Fred & Lisa (Peg’s brother and SIL). Then back here to Eugene to pick up the Ambassador. Once we leave Eugene we are considering an en route stop in Portland at IKEA — we would like to find 2 rectangular rugs for our lounge to improve the life of our carpeting. (No Sales Tax in Oregon — might as well take advantage!)
We have until August 17th to mosey as far as Crosslake MN. That’s a couple thousand miles in only 5 days, but not having driven the Ambassador very far since picking her up this is our shakedown and we want to see what it’s like to drive a few hundred miles a day several days in a a row in the new coach. We’ve been stationary for so long I need to have some wheels rolling. It’s atypical of us, but a life unscripted is about keeping things changed up and not getting into any ruts. Once we hit Crosslake we have a couple nights there, then a short hop, a few nights in St Croix Falls, WI, then a couple weeks in Blackhawk Park, near Desoto WI, and finally a couple weeks at Bong Recreation area — the closest option to Milwaukee proper other than the expensive one at the Wisconsin State Fair.
We are both looking forward to the future. During the process of saying goodbyes we were reminded by some of the volunteer stories we heard that life is short, we are relative short-timers on this planet as well and to use each day well and fully is important. So as the day wore on, and the adrenalin from the last few days and week began to subside, we really collapsed. We need a few days to relax. We have been pushing ourselves a lot during the last few weeks — specially trying to get all the campsite images sorted out — and the toll it has taken will take some recovery time. I think it’s important to know yourself well enough to be able to anticipate this kind of need. I didn’t always think about such things — pushing myself to the limits when I was younger — but I’m a little better as we age. So, neither of us actually ‘slept’ very much during the day but we talked and read and puttered around the house simply enjoying the quiet and not having phone calls or volunteers on our minds. Seemed I did a lot of sighing. Perhaps it’s just my body shedding layers of care.
Timeliness
I mentioned the other day that I have been writing my blog entries a few days early and letting them sit to insure that I didn’t have reservations about publishing what I might have considered confidential after the fact. Now that we done with the Forest I’ll get back to more timely posts, and there may be days when we don’t have a WiFi connection where we are unable to post. I’d rather be closer to current. It confuses me when I’m reading other blogs and I’m reading on Thursday about something that happened on Sunday.
Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll talk with you tomorrow.
Like this:
Like Loading...
You must be logged in to post a comment.