Mike & Kris - Enjoying The Ride

“What do you do all day”? Its been almost a year since I retired from my job as a construction foreman and I’ve been asked that question several times. Believe it or not I almost always give the same answer. “Whatever I want”.

The things you have to do when you have a job are to get up early and go to work every day. You only have the weekends to do all the fun stuff. On our weekends there was, of course, baseball games to go to and coach, basketball, soccer, swim team, water polo and a long list of other activities that Matt and Hannah were involved in. Kris and I enjoyed every minute of every activity. We wouldn’t trade any of it.

But now Hannah’s in Michigan, Matt is at Cal Poly and there is nothing that I have to do. I get to do all the stuff that I never had time for, all the stuff where I said I’ll get to that later. Well it’s later now.

When you walk in the door at Guitar Center and look at all the really shiny new guitars hanging on the wall you say to yourself “Wow, This Place is So Cool”. That’s one of the things I’ve done this year. I bought myself a guitar and started taking (online) lessons. I haven’t gotten very far and I don’t practice very much, but I always wanted to and now I can do it.

When I was about 19 some friends of mine in Washington talked me into playing golf. Now I had never played before and was really bad that day, but I could tell that this could be kinda fun. If only I wasn’t terrible at it. Last summer my nephew Frankie asked Matt and I if we wanted to play golf at the Tacoma Swiss club golf tournament . We said yes. Now I hadn’t played in about 25 years and Matt had never played and that day we played as you would expect. The difference between being bad at golf and being really, really bad is practice. So last fall I found myself at Golfsmith being fitted for a set of clubs. Man what a difference that made. I had an old set of clubs that I bought a long time ago. I probably had them over 30 years. They just never got the job done. It was one of the reasons I never played. I like these new clubs a lot. There’s a little 9 hole course about a mile from my house. I’ve started taking lessons there and try to get out to the range once a week. Now I’m not as terrible as I used to be.

Of course the big thing we’ve done since I retired is buy our Pickup and Fifth Wheel trailer. We also started this online blog site. As you can see in our earlier posts we traveled pretty far last summer. Taking a RV around the country has always been something I dreamed about doing. Kris shares my enthusiasm for this. I alway thought the idea of documenting our travels and sharing them online was a cool thing to do too. Its mainly to keep our family and friends updated on where we’re going and what we’re doing. Its also so we can look back and relive all the fun we’ve had. Since our last post we’ve been to our favorite place in Morro Bay twice. The most recent was two weeks ago. Now we’re getting ready to go to Arizona for Spring Training.

This year I want to post on the blog more often. So here’s to the first of many…

Mike