When we got home on Monday, the bus and I had been away from the house for 128 days (130 days including the day we left and the day we returned) spanning portions of five months.  We moved into our new (to us) house on April 12th, 2013.  From May 1st of last year through the end of April 2014 we were in our motorcoach 214 of those 365 days ( +/- a couple of days).  Not bad for our first year as extended-time RVers and our first snowbird season.

Although we are still relative newbies at extended-time RVing this past year allowed us to develop a reasonable understanding of how to make it work for us.  But now we are home and that entails a different pace and rhythm to which we have had to quickly adjust.  First and foremost was letting folks know we were back and arranging visits with family and friends.  After that we have to deal with dentist appointments, veterinary appointments, doctor appointments, car appointments, computer upgrades, WordPress websites, photo editing software, ham radio club breakfasts and meetings, a communications tower, ham radio antennas, an OTA TV antenna, a cell phone repeater system, landscaping projects, fruit trees (pruning), a pole barn, conversion of the house to natural gas, and a list of bus projects (of course).  All by December 1st.  Right.

Gus the cat. He has the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a cat.

Today was dental appointments followed by a detour to Ann Arbor to visit with our younger grand-daughter and her parents.  I’ve put some photos from that visit in a separate gallery post.  We stopped at the Whole Foods market and picked up something for lunch as well as ingredients Linda needed for making granola.  Madeline was napping when we arrived, so we got to visit with Brendan for a little while, but once she woke up she was ready to go.  It was 70 degrees F outside so we put her in the stroller and took her to the park that is the centerpiece of their neighborhood.  She spent a lot of time walking and running in the grass, up and down concrete ramps, but especially climbing the stairs for the slides and then sliding down.  Not long after we got back to the house Shawna got home from work and Madeline got a lot of mommy interaction.  By that point it was rush hour and we decided to stay for dinner.

No one was prepared to cook and rather than get carryout or delivery we decided to go to The Lunch Room, a relatively new vegan restaurant in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown district.  Linda had a vegan mac & cheese and I had a mock Rueben made with Tempeh and a cup of vegan tomato bisque soup.  Everything was very good, including the vegan desserts: a grasshopper brownie for Linda and a no-flour chocolate cupcake with a Bourbon / Caramel / Pastry Cream frosting for me.  All of the food was very good and reasonably priced, which is not always the case in Ann Arbor.  By the time we got home and I took a phone call, there wasn’t much of the evening left.

So the new normal for us is not one or the other, it’s both/and; figuring out how to balance two very different ways of living and, in particular, how to flow back and forth between them as easily, smoothly, and quickly as possible.  But that may be just the sort of challenge our brains need to remain agile as we begin our forth score of years.