Our Story

In anticipation of traveling when we retired, I have been reading travel blogs for years.  My favorite thing is to go to the very first entry in hopes of getting some background on the travelers to better understand their journey.  So this is "our story."

We have been married for 33 years.  If using that to determine our ages, Mark is fast to quip that we were both ten years old when we got married.  Actually, that isn't far from the truth.  We were high school friends, college sweethearts, and I was 19 when we got married.  (I'm afraid I have just divulged my age--never a good idea for a female!)

Our marriage has been blessed with two amazing sons, and we are proud that they are now on their own.  Our oldest son, Luke, is married to our beautiful daughter-in-law Jordan, and is now in his last year of medical school.  Our youngest son, Blake, graduated from college and started his new job as an engineer.  So our financial parenting commitments are finally over.  We did the math and discovered that two can live pretty inexpensively.  We have been saving our pennies for a long time, and if we continue to live conservatively, we think we can make this thing happen.

We have also been blessed by good jobs at Southwestern Oklahoma State University.  We have a pension plan that allows for some nice retirement benefits.  So we counted our blessings and began a plan that would allow us to retire in January 2015.  I wrote a daily journal for 25 years about the wonderful things that our sons said and did, so now I am looking forward to blogging about our travels.