Five Mornings From Now

Five mornings from now we will be pulling out of our driveway and beginning our road trip across the country. So far we have scheduled visits to Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and starting to work on our visit to South Carolina. That should take us through our first month of the road trip. We will have driven about 2,890 miles when we get to Pelion, SC, our first stop in South Carolina. It looks like we will be in North Carolina the first week of May.

I am excited to get this trip started! We have only a tiny bit of packing to do for the trip and for the move. That feels good. I am a planner. I am trying to go with the flow on the trip and at the same time be mindful of other people’s schedules so balancing the flow is taking some time. There has only been one person so far that cannot see us when we are in their area. They are only available for a visit during weekends and already had plans for the weekend we are near them. Another time.

I did take a moment today for a manicure. That was a lovely treat. One I realized I can do while on our road trip. Joe reminded me this morning that when we went to live in Egypt (July 2002 to July 2003), it was an entirely different culture, and we did just fine. One of my favorite books fifty years ago was John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Charley was a dog.

Charley and John traveled the U.S. in a pickup truck with a camper shell. We have a nice cozy Subaru Outback where we can comfortably sleep when we want to stop at a campground instead of a hotel. Maximizing our choices of where to travel to and when.  We will not have a dog on our trip. My essays could be entitled Travels with Joe. Joe is a human. My sweet husband.

Five mornings (Wednesday, March 29^th) from now we will be leaving our California home with the plan to make Minnesota our residence. Our residency will not start until we arrive in Minnesota – so we will be Californian’s for awhile longer.

Five mornings from now we will be leaving our friends and heading out to visit other friends. I am grateful for Facetime, Zoom, Google Meets, WhatsApp, Messenger, and other programs that allow us to stay in touch with face time. This is different when we moved to Egypt in 2002. Then we were reduced to phone calls and emails. We had mobile phones but many of our friends did not so communicating was more limited.

Five mornings from now we will begin a new journey.