Settling down a bit.

I hadn’t had a very good night’s sleep since my mom passed away nearly 6 months ago. The routine had become waking up after a couple hours in bed, laying there trying to get back to sleep, and half the time just getting up, working on a puzzle or reading, and then trying to doze off again in the recliner. It was getting kind of old, but I thought maybe that was the new normal.

Well, since arriving in Minnesota, more like the old routines have started to return. While either noises or dreams seem to wake me a couple of times during the night, I don’t lie awake for hours, and can pretty much sleep through till 5ish – that is pretty much the old routine I had become accustomed to. Yippee!

Our accomplishments have not been huge since arriving, but we have taken some nice advantage of what the area has to offer. We took in Detroit 67 at the Penumbra Theater in the old mansion district of St. Paul. The play was about an inner city family during the race riots in Detroit in 1967 that either I was too young to have focused on, or wasn’t publicized the way such things would be today, because neither I nor the Woman had any recollection of them. The play was excellent and very thought provoking. We took the chance to walk around the area and take in the beautiful old Victorian homes, and then popped into WA Frost for dinner hors douvres.

We have discovered the wonders of the Lake Elmo Wilderness Preserve, a Washington County park just a couple of miles from our RV Park. The park has miles of paved biking trails, groomed hiking trails, some of which are available for both biking and equestrian use, and lots of other infrastructure for camping, picnicking, swimming, and all kinds of outdoor fun. We really enjoy our visits there.

We have been hiking almost daily at Lake Elmo Preserve – at least those that don’t include rain! We have probably logged about 40 miles there between the bikes and the hikers – and I am pretty sure we have only covered a bit of overlapping trails. I think we will have enough to keep us interested throughout our stay.

Our long draught of culture in Vegas will be over by the end of the year, but in the mean time we got our fix by strolling through the IKEA next to the Mall of America – what fun! Not only did we experience the overstimulation of all those millions of items to fill our houses, but we managed to pick up a bag of Swedish meatballs as well.

I will be signing off for a few days - my former partners at McGladrey were kind enough to invite me to their partner meeting in Las Vegas next week, so I am hoping on a plane tomorrow and heading back home. Pretty ironic that McGladrey has their partner meeting in my home town and I still have to fly in to attend. I guess that is what retired life on the road means!. We hope to tick up our accomplishments a bit when I return, now that we are settled in a bit.

Talk to you soon!