Stuff

 We've been busy lately. Carole retired from her job and is only working part time (she'll take full retirement in less than two years). We continue to visit state, national, county, and forest parks with our travel trailer serving as our base of operations. We're planning two big trips to round out the year, but have found we have to make a list and never get our first choice of destination due to campgrounds being full. From what we read the reason for full campgrounds everywhere is because people went stir crazy during the lockdown and vast numbers of those people have purchased tents and travel trailers and are hitting the roads to travel in record numbers. I believe it.

For years we've talked about taking the Casita trailer to Pennsylvania. That's where we'll likely end up going next. And we want to take a decent Autumn vacation somewhere to view the Fall colors, which we tend to do around Halloween every year. We'd like to continue that tradition as long as we can find a place where we can park the trailer for a few days. We'll likely avoid the Great Smoky Mountains National Park considering the nightmarish traffic we encountered there in 2019.

On the personal front I went to see an insurance planner referred to us by my wife's financial adviser. I switch to Medicare in twelve months and needed advice on supplemental plans to cover the things Medicare does not. She helped me pencil in the basic path I'll follow in one more year. (Nine months, actually, since you receive your Medicare card three months prior to your birthday and have to act at that time.) I remain pretty healthy for a man of 64 and want to stay strong enough to hike, kayak, and backpack for at least another decade. We'll see. I've already lived longer than my dad did, so there's that.

My second WORKING CLASS HERO novel inches closer to completion and the third book is completely plotted. After that I have a new writing project on which I have been tinkering for years. It's something that I very much want to see finished and which I wish to be able to market to a traditional press. Going the traditional route is getting to be tougher--it's almost as bad as trying to crack the professional circle-jerk comic book industry of the 1980s. I wonder if there will even be an independent traditional publishing industry in a few more years, or if we'll see Amazon as a privately held publishing monopoly.

Well, on that happy note I'll take off till next time. We have a kayak trip down the New River planned for this coming week. That's always a pleasure. The extended weather forecast looks promising.

This video is from a family trip we took last week to Damascus, VA to bike the Virginia Creeper Trail. Andy had never done that so we all headed up early last Saturday to rent bike and take the shuttle van to Whitetop Station for the ride down the mountain back to Damascus. We had a blast! However, this video is only of Beaverdam Creek at the nearby Backbone Rock Recreation Area which we visited after the bike ride. My old video editing software won't work on the new desktop computer I bought this week, so I have to use a new program. This video of the creek is my first experiment with that software.