My sweet hubby and I just returned from a two-week vacay through the west with our travel buddies and dearest friends, the Wises. Being in our later fifties and beyond in age, we leisurely revisited some of our favorite haunts and ventured into new and exciting places we’d never seen before. This included the majestic, glorious, awe-inspiring, God created Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest which stretched miles across the AZ desert – that hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a tree in a million years or so.
We watched five moose, four elk (which left the hunter in Kirk salivating), 691 antelope (mild exaggeration), and an assortment of prairie dogs and gophers frolic across the mountain forests, prairies and deserts. We played cards under the stars. We dipped our toes in the Amaris River and enjoyed a three-hour train ride in the cold mountain air, glued to the passing scenery and wiping our noses the entire trip. We picnicked at an old, abandoned mining town, riding on a side-by-side with the wind tossing our graying hair to and fro (and taking a few strands with it) leaving tangles which will never be combed out and hee-hawed at a Dude Ranch Cowboy Show in Colorado with 200 hundred other ‘senior’ citizens all hamming it up like we were teenagers. There were no young elites there to tell us any different. They were all working jobs or taking care of our grandchildren! Poor babies.
We then traversed the infamous Route 66 and made our way to Sante Fe wherein we enjoyed shopping and fine dining, then drove onto a corner in Winslow, AZ, the capital of the Eagle’s infamous rock and roll hit “Take It Easy”. We did everything there, except that!
We indulged in a list of ‘healthy’ foods including blackberry cream sodas, homemade fudge, fifteen Mexican dining excursions and a host of other local specialties, eating then eating again, never once counting calories. According to my calculations we each gained an average of ten pounds, and it will take us three months or more to shed that which we so easily acquired!
We even converted the one rule follower in our padre to live on the wild side a time or two! (Explanation: our wild side is well within a range of mild to placid. Jay-walking was about as wild as we got.)
Of course, we recorded it all on our cellphones cumulatively taking over 4,000 photos that will never see print and more than a few videos that we will probably never ever watch again and which our families have not the least inkling of interest to peruse. Imagine that.
When it was all said and done, we bought a bounty of unwanted souvenirs for our grandkids and rejoiced that we have reached the age where we can travel without worry, then we hitched up our attitudes and started planning our next vacation adventure – an Alaskan cruise, which is on all our bucket lists!
We returned home refreshed and rested…. not! We drug our old tails in the best we could. Our knees hurt. Our backs ached. Kirk’s sciatic nerve was flaring. My $10,000.00 knee replacement felt stiff and achy. We were exhausted. Pooped. Spent. We decided vacationing is hard work and that we should have done our traveling when we were younger, stronger, and had all of our original parts. We might need to start – as the old song said – taking it easy. But then, who are we kidding?
I’ll tell you straight up, retirement is hard, but we’re managing. We will continue to travel with our travel tribe, despite the ‘dirty looks’ our adult children give us when we share our intentions to do so. You’d think they loved us or something. We’ll go even though we miss our grandkids and cut each and every trip short by a few days, rushing home to kiss their adorable little faces. We will persevere. We will forge ahead. We will enjoy our vacations and travels – even if it kills us! And if we live to tell the stories of our vast explorations, we’ll plan another one. We’ll take it easy, when we’re in our eighties or nineties –the Good Lord willing.
