Home Base

  While our first year's adventure has ended, we are not done with our travels, not by any means. We are currently in the midst of a cross-America trip, visiting our three children, our three in-law children, and our four grandchildren. Part of this voyage will include a train excursion with tours of the Rocky Mountain and Yosemite National Parks.

   As we made our plans to return to the United States, a decision was made to have a home base. But why would we need one, you might ask? In addition to the psychological sense of having an anchor location, there were several reasons why we made this decision. Health care issues played a big part. Most doctors, dentists, and/or labs will only accept new patients as long as they lived locally. Our daughter-in-law, Valerie, ran head-first into this aspect when trying to arrange our physician appointments. Having her do this for us was a huge help. An additional complication arose when the HMO Doctor and the pharmacy we were using kept miscommunicating over one prescription. It took us the better part of two weeks of calling both to straighten out this problem. Imagine trying to deal with this while on the move. This would have been a much bigger hassle if we hadn't had a home base out of which to work. Being able to have one location in which to receive important mail and bills was necessary for us. But this would only work as long as there was someone there to monitor the mail. Our solution was to appoint our son, Carl, as our power-of-attorney. In addition to monitoring the mail, a power-of-attorney can pay bills that are not covered under an auto-pay system, as well as to handle tax issues (e.g. dealing with a tax accountant and paying tax bills).

  Our travel adventure plans include having a place which we can return to at the end of each year's excursions. You might question why, then, we did not just re-invest into a new home of our own? If we had gone that route , we would have spent our whole travel time worrying about the home while away. Besides, we aren't yet ready to settle down.

Our granddaughter, Lucy, on a school field trip.

During our stay in Carl and Valerie's home in Columbus, Ohio, we took Lucy and her brother, Eamon, to watch the 3-D movie "Pan".

Lucy and Eamon posing in the theater lobby.

Of course, we also had to take them out to dinner (although they seemed to be more interested in what was occurring on the phone rather than eating).