Let me warn you now, this is going to be a Debbie Downer of a post. I had big aspirations for 2024 and so far it’s been less than stellar. I’m full of frustration and I think that if I write it all down it might make me feel a little better. I totally understand if you want to skip this post. I wouldn’t blame you at all.

We spent the last four months of 2023 in Canada with my in-laws and had a great time. Those visits were a long time in coming, delayed first by the pandemic and then by my liver issues. My recovery from the transplant progressed nicely and by the end of the year I was feeling better than I had in five years. My energy and stamina levels were near where they had been before I got sick. This stationary time also allowed Michelle to get some much needed surgery on her foot that had been plaguing her for years. As great a time we had there, you can imagine that by the end of that four months our wander lust was tickling smacking us in the back of the neck.

We had grand plans to spend the first half of 2024 exploring places along the west coast, including many mountain location this obsessed hiker had only read about and wanted to visit. So in the first week of January, we bid farewell to the family, crossed the border and headed out on our journey. Our first stop was a planned two weeks in a town in Washington called Leavenworth. This town is modeled after a European Bavarian village which we really like. We visited one a couple years before in Texas called Fredericksburg. I especially wanted to visit because when I was a kid I lived in West Germany for a few years and it would be like returning there. The village is nestled in the middle of the Cascade Mountains a couple hours east of Seattle. We were coming from Osoyoos, British Columbia and had a nice four hour drive along the eastern side of the mountain range until we turned west and headed up to Leavenworth.

We stayed at the KOA which was a little pricey and above our normal budget for a landing spot but we decided to splurge for two weeks to start off the trip. After getting set up in our site we did a quick drive through the town which was as Bavarian as advertised. We were going to have a lot of fun exploring the area. However, that day we were tired from the drive and just grabbed a very Non-Bavarian meal from McDonalds and went back to the rig. That night, while we slept, it started to snow and it didn’t stop for the next three weeks. Yup, THREE WEEKS! But you only planned on a two weeks stay, you say? I know! We were trapped. Our original plan was to continue west through the mountains and then follow the range down the west side to visit other areas of interest. However, all the mountain passes headed west were closed. To make matters worse, so were the ones we had driven through on the east side to get there! We were forced to spend money we didn’t have on another week there at the KOA.

The snow caused havoc with everything. Despite a heated hose, our water froze. Despite having heaters on all our tanks, the outlet of our black and grey sewer tanks froze so we couldn’t dump. I won’t even go into detail on how our two dogs got their business done in that mess. Despite all of that we did manage to get into town a few times and have some wonderful meals, but it was just too damn cold and the multiple feet of snow was so high that we just couldn’t do the exploring that we wanted.

By the end of the third week there was still snow but it had slacked off some. Not enough to open the mountain passes heading west, but the ones heading east were open, barely. Our plans had been to head west and south down to Mount Rainier National Park. I really wanted to do some hiking there, but that was out of the question now. This is when I realized I had made a grave tactical error in planning this whole trip. I did not take into account how bad the winter weather could get out west, especially in the mountain areas I wanted to visit so badly. At this point, all we wanted to do was get out of the snow so at least our RV systems would go back to working normally. I looked for a place to go that was within one days driving distance and would get us out of the snow. I settled on a two week stay in a state park in Bend, Oregon. The forecast had no snow for at least the next week.

We dug out, and got on the road to Bend. Those mountain passes to the east were open but they were not snow free. Let’s just say both of use (and probably the dogs too) experienced several butt cheek clinching moments on the drive down. We made it down, and the park was really nice and even better, a lot cheaper. The third day we were there it snowed. And it snowed on and off the rest of the two week stay. Not that it reached the apocalyptic levels that it had in Washington, but it still caused problems. Despite that, I managed to get a decent day hike in through some beautiful forests and we also got to visit the last Blockbuster Video store on Earth. I have a T-shirt to commemorate the visit.

When the two weeks was up we had a bit of a dilemma on where to go next. Our trip plans hadn’t been all pleasure related, there was a business element to it also. I work for the Navy as a technical writer and have been working remotely since 2019. My parent command was located in Southern California and I needed to make a stop there to deal with some computer issues I had been having with my work laptop and also to attend retirement training. Yup! That’s right! After 37 years of government service (including a 10 year active duty hitch) I am going to retire this year. The class was on a set date and I had planned a two week stay around it in order to wrap up any work business and visit with some of my work friends who I hadn’t seen in years.

Having to stay in Leavenworth for three weeks had thrown off the timeline. Originally, we had planned on staying near Mount Hood for two weeks before heading to Southern California, but now we only had one week before I needed to get back to headquarters. So why not just do one week at Mount Hood? We had kind of instituted a minimum two-week stay at any location due to the fact that it took a lot of effort to set up camp only to turn around and break it all down in just a week. Also, I still had to work during the week so that didn’t even leave a full weekend for fun and games. To make matters even worse in this case, the Mount Hood area was totally snowed in, and we wanted none of that! So in the end, we decided to just go early to Southern California and spend three weeks there instead of two.

When you think of Southern California, you probably think of sun, beaches, and movie stars. In other words, you think it’s a paradise. There are places like that there, just not where we were going. If you have never visited Oxnard, California, consider yourself lucky. Let’s just say there is a certain criminal element in the city that makes it not the nicest place in the world and leave it at that. However, we hadn’t planned on staying right in Oxnard. We had planned on staying on a Navy base just south of there on the beach called Point Mugu. The Navy had an RV park on that base and from everything I heard, it was a pretty nice place. Plus, of course, at government rates it was pretty inexpensive.

Just one problem though. When I went to make reservations there a few weeks before, I found out the place had been shut down due to some unseasonably strong rain that area had been experiencing that had flooded the RV park. Yeah, rain, it wasn’t snow which we were grateful for, but out of the three weeks we were there it rained about two and half of them. With the base park closed I went in search of other commercial places to stay. There are nicer areas around Oxnard, including Ventura where I actually used to live when I physically worked there, but all of the parks around that area were astronomically expensive and outside our budget. We finally had to settle for a little RV Park right in the middle of downtown Oxnard that was just slightly in our budget. The place was gated which was nice, but let’s just say that the absence of police sirens was the rare occasion and the sound of trains rolling through every thirty minutes on the tracks located directly next to the park were our sounds of nature.

Despite this, there were a few highlights. I got to reconnect with some of my old work friends. There were some really nice people at the RV park that we hung out with. I managed to sneak in a two night hike on the Pacific Crest Trail between the rains, although it was a close call. I was racing the next storm back down the mountains at the end of my trip. So we made the most of the situation. But, just like the title of this post says, every time we seemed to be making a step forward, we’d take two steps back.

That next two steps back came when I went through retirement training. My whole plan had been to attend this training and then get the ball rolling so that I would retire sometime in June which would be my earliest date to be eligible. At least I thought it would be. The training revealed a flaw in that plan. You needed at least 30 years of government service to retire and be at least 56 years old. No problem, I checked the box on both of those. Here was the rub though. My first ten years had been active duty in the Navy. The next 27 years was all civil service. It was my understanding that all my government time would count toward that 30 years. Turns out it doesn’t. You actually have to buy back your active duty time for it to count. I had know there was an option to buy back your military time but I only thought that would get you a higher retirement annuity pay out. It does, significantly so I would find out during the training, but it also had to be bought back to even count toward your government service time for retirement. I had not bought back my military time. So, imagine my let down to discover that only 27 years counted toward my retirement eligibility!

The whole plan for this year had been to explore the west side of the country, then retire in June and spend the rest of the year training to through hike the entire Appalachian Trail in 2025. If anyone reading this has been following this blog for any length of time, you would know that is my life long dream. I was finally feeling physically fit enough to do it and the retirement would give me the time to do so. Finding that all of that was in jeopardy now was soul crushing. All is not lost yet, though. I am in the process of trying to buy back my military time right now, but it is not an easy or quick process. It’s going to be a race against the clock to get that done and then have enough time to go through the retirement process which I can’t even start without the military time being bought back. Not to mention the cost of this. I don’t have the total amount yet but an estimate is putting it in the $4,000 range. I certainly won’t be retiring in June. My hope is that I can retire by the end of the year, but even that is going to be a close call and still having to work is not going to leave me much time to train for the hike which I plan to start in March of 2025.

Let’s just say that attitudes, especially mine, were not high spirited. I was hoping our next planned stop would lift those spirits. We were going to Yosemite National Park. The previous summer we had spent some time in Yellowstone National Park and it had been a blast. I was looking forward to having the same kind of fun at Yosemite. I was even thinking about taking two weeks of leave from work to enjoy it even more. That’s when I checked the weather forecast for Yosemite. It was currently covered in about five feet of snow with a ton more predicted for the following weeks to come. Yosemite was out!

OK, well we’ll just skip that part and go to the next destination we had planned after Yosemite, Las Vegas! No snow there and Michelle and I loved us a good casino trip. Two weeks in Vegas should be all kinds of fun. Then we took a look at our finances. We calculated that with all the unforeseen expenses we had encountered so far in the year, we could afford to put about $10 in a slot machine and hope for the best. We realized that plan probably wasn’t the most fiscally responsible one and decided to skip Vegas for the next destination in the itinerary, Colorado.

Since going full-time in 2020 we had spent a couple of trips in Colorado, including a wonderful time the summer before in Salida. We didn’t want to be relatively close without at least another two week stop there. In addition, my daughter had move to Denver in the last year and I hadn’t seen her for a long time. This trip would allow us to get back in beautiful country and get to visit with her. OK, let’s check the weather. You already know. Snow, snow, and more snow. Not just the normal snow that Colorado would get, but blizzards. Even with that shit show forecasted we considered going anyway just so we could visit with my daughter. I hadn’t talked to her in a bit and it turns out that during that period of radio silence, she had gotten sick of the weather there too and had moved to North Carolina. So Colorado was a bust on multiple angles.

It was at this point we gave up. In addition to snow or financial concerns pretty much RV blocking us on all planned destinations, the RV itself was a hurting unit. Driving an RV is like putting your house through a 4.0 earthquake every time you get on the road. It takes a toll. Add in the extreme weather conditions we had been in lately and it totaled up to a LeeLander that was barely chugging along. It was in sore need of an extended overhaul. With all these issues in mind, we decided to go running to Mommy and Daddy. By that, I mean we asked my parents if they would mind us mooch docking on their farm in Texas for a bit while we got all our repairs to the rig done and I worked on my retirement process. Of course they agreed and that’s where we are right now. We’ve been here just over a month.

Before we left, I made a list of all the things that needed to be fixed or addressed before we got on the road again. The list was longer than my arm. The trip from California to Texas would take two to three days depending on how many hours we drove each day, which in our older years is decreasing more and more. The trip itself mostly went really well and we were ahead of schedule on Sunday when we decided to just push through a few more hours to get there. It would put us at my parents later in the evening, but since I had already taken Monday off in anticipation that it might take us that long to get there, I would have a whole day to rest. You ever hear how man makes plans and the universe laughs?

It must have been laughing its ass off when we were about two hours out from our destination, having just navigated the mess of traffic that Dallas had been when there was a loud noise and the normal earthquake rose from 4.0 to 9.0 on the Richter Scale! I managed to get the rig pulled over to the side of the still very busy Interstate 20 to check out what had happened. As cars and trucks whizzed by me by mere inches at 80 MPH, I was able to determine that the inner back left tire of the rig had blown out. I managed to limp the rig to the next exit and find a more suitable roadside area to park so I could do a more thorough investigation. The investigation revealed exactly what I already knew. The tire was blown and we weren’t going anywhere.

It wasn’t like I could just change the tire either, like I would have done if it had been the Jeep. For one, there was no spare RV tire on the rig. Something that I always wondered about but put off worrying about until a Sunday afternoon three years later along a lonely country road just outside of Dallas. Now I was worrying plenty. Even if I did have a spare tire it wasn’t like I had a jack that could lift that behemoth. Nope, this was going to require calling someone to come out and most likely tow the rig, our house, to a place to repair the tire. Something that we could hardly afford, but what choice did we have? I’ll tell you. I made a choice to not deal with the situation at that late hour. I uncoupled the Jeep from the tow rig, unloaded all the crap we usually keep in there while on the road, stuffed it all in the rig, got the wife and the dogs loaded, and took the Jeep the rest of the two hour trip to my parents house so I could come up with a plan for fixing and retrieving the rig the next day. I won’t even talk about the wreck on the interstate that turned that two hour trip into a four hour one.

The next day, I did have a stroke of luck when I started searching out places that could handle a tire changeout on a rig of our size. There was actually a big rig repair shop less than one mile away on that country road that told me they could easily change it out if I could get it there. They even had 24 hour service. If I had only known that last night, ugh, no, let’s not even think about that. My dad drove me the two hour trip back and I nursed the rig down to the repair shop. An hour and a half later it was fixed and I was back on the road to my parents house.

With our house on (all) wheels back we got to work on that list. That’s where the title of this post really kicks in. It seems like every time I get one of those things on that list crossed off, two more would appear on it. Let me give you an example. We had been dealing with a leaking water inlet port for months. The section where you hooked up your external water source hose would constantly leak when pressure was applied. Due to this, I had been just filling up the external water tank and using the internal pump for sinks, shower, and toilet since it would only leak for the amount of time it took me to fill up the tank and then turn off the external water source. I had ordered a replacement part to fix this leak months ago but due to the fact I would have to take a big section of the side of the rig off to fix it, I had been delaying the repair because the weather was either too cold or too wet to have a hole in the side of the rig for any length of time. This was my first order of business at Casa Overhaul. I spent a whole day replacing the part and the leak was fixed! We could now just have our regular external water source available instead of having to fill up a tank every few days when it went dry. The very next day, after I was done with my paid work, I went to go work on another item on the list when I noticed water leaking out the back of the rig. An investigation discovered that the hot water heater tank was leaking! Not just leaking at a hose connection or anything that would be easy to fix, no, leaking from a welding joint on the tank. I tried all kinds of sealers on that tank that would make me think it was fixed until days later it would start leaking again. I finally ripped the whole thing out and took it to a radiator repair shop, where it sits right now. I am waiting on a call to hopefully go pick it up soon.

I won’t bore you (more than I already have) with the details on other issues that pretty much have gone this way. Every time we get something fixed or take care of an issue on that list, it seems like two other things break or become an issue. In addition, the additional work I have to do to get my retirement done has not been going smoothly. I completed the first round of paperwork I needed to do in order to get that military time bought back and submitted it. I waited three weeks for a response and got nothing. When I called, which finding a human to talk to was a challenge in and of itself, was told that I had missed one small detail on the paperwork which makes it all null and void. Now, did they think to call me and tell me that so I hadn’t wasted all that time thinking things were being processed? Did they think to e-mail me? Text me? Even send me snail mail or a carrier pigeon? Nope.

To add to our happy little trip back to Texas, Michelle’s foot surgery repair failed and she had to go back for another one. Now she is laid up in bed for God knows how many weeks, the doctor won’t speculate yet. This is driving her crazy and keeping her from doing all the things she had planned for this age of repair renaissance. We aren’t even sure when we’ll be leaving here. Certainly not before she heals and this ever growing list can at least get winnowed down to something manageable. I’m scheduled for a book sell and signing at this year’s Trail Days in Virginia in May and it’s something that should have me elated but now it’s all in flux and making me just view it as a burden.

On top of all that, the health I was bragging about being so good at the beginning of the year? It’s took a turn downward. A side effect of liver transplant surgery can be an abdominal hernia. I got one of those last summer, or at least I thought I did. A big hump pushing out of my gut like I am pregnant. The doctor said nothing could done about it until it had been a year since the transplant so I dealt with it until that time came and while we were in Canada I crossed back across the border to see a doctor in Washington. He scheduled me for hernia surgery but the day before cancelled it after reviewing a CAT scan I had done a few days before. He determined that I didn’t have a hernia, just a weak abdominal wall. Do some sit ups he tells me. That’ll strengthen the abdominal muscles. Yeaharight! I couldn’t even do a sit up before I got sick! So this pregnancy hump has gotten so huge that I must be having twins, triplets even! And, oh yeah, it hurts. It didn’t at first but now it does. It’s starting to hurt bad and not only that, I can feel things inside that are, how do I say this, just not right. Pressure from things that seem like they are not in the right place. Why don’t I go to the doctor? Because he is in Virginia. Even so, he sent me MRI orders which I just got done. What did it show? Except for a little swelling in my spleen, nothing. I’m fine. Where did I hear that before? Oh, yeah, over five years ago when I told all the doctors something was wrong and they told me I was fine before finally finding out a year later that I had a lethal disease that would only be cured by a transplant. Here were are, back again. I need to get back there to see him in person to express the gravity of what I think is going to be the decline of my health again. But here I am, stuck in Texas.

To top it all off? It’s total eclipse day and by happenstance, we are in a 98% totality path. Not that I am one of those people that is going all gaga over it but I wouldn’t mind seeing it since I’m in the path. Know what I see when I look up? Rain clouds.

OK, so that’s my Debbie Downer spiel. Do I feel better? Not sure. If you read all this, I know you don’t.

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