Thoughts After One Month on the Road

It has now been a month since we left our home in Oklahoma and drove off into the sunset.  We've learned a little and had a lot of fun.  Here are some thoughts on the first month from both of us:

Denisa - You can still get a tooth ache and need a doctor even when you are on permanent vacation.  Even with dental insurance, the endodontist made us pay the total price in full because we weren't "from around here."  Now there are the phone calls to the insurance company and the doctor's office to get reimbursed.

Mark - Our outdoor loungers and cooker still don't know that we have retired.  They are still neatly tucked away in the storage bays under the motorhome.  I'm not sure when the relaxing part of retirement starts?!?

Denisa - When you don't have a local bank, you don't have a good place to cash a check.  So we finally decided to open an account at a bank that has branches across the country with a good on-line system.

Mark - The alarm has been set before 7 a.m. almost every morning.  For the last 3 weeks we have been at Bentsen Grove Resort, where there is an exercise class at 8 a.m.  We made friends with Art, who was a football coach at Moore High School in the Oklahoma City area.  If we miss exercise class, Art chastises us the next time we see him.  There's something about disapproval from a football coach that will get Mark out of bed earlier than he had planned.

Denisa - We are working at becoming Texas residents, but we're not sure if this state wants us.  There is a lot of paperwork to get vehicles registered and tagged in Texas.  Vehicles have to be safety inspected yearly.  Most important, we have to take a series of written tests and a driving test to get a driver's license to drive our motorhome.  There will be a blog about this later.

Mark - One of Mark's plans for retirement was to learn to play the guitar.  With all his extra time, he would surely have time to sit for hours learning to strum beautiful melodies.  In the last month, the only time the guitar case has been opened was to see if it had been smashed.  The only space for the guitar and case is behind the driver's seat.  We forgot to move it one time when we put the slides out, and didn't notice until we heard an awful crushing sound.  The good news is that it was the case, and not the guitar that was being crushed at that point.

Denisa -  We still feel like we need to get something accomplished every day, and we are often frustrated at how long things take.  It's a good thing that we have an extra eight hours in our day to get 30 minutes of business accomplished.

We wish we would have kept track of how many times this first month we have heard, "But you're too young to be retired!"  We were feeling pretty old among our peers when we were working.  But now that we are hanging out with senior citizens we are feeling really young among our new peers.