#210 Nomad Diary. 26 October- 1 November 2024. Week 2 of 2 in Athens, Alabama Airbnb Near Two of Our Grandkids. Nomad Notes and Our Family History Move to Madison, Alabama.

Darrell Doing Computer Work at Our Athens, Alabama Airbnb. Our Crates and Trunks are in the Picture.

My Changing Room at Our 3 Bedroom Athens, Alabama Airbnb.

Beautiful Fall Colors at Swan Creek Walkway in Athens, Alabama.

This Beautiful Fall Colored Tree is Across the Street from Our Duplex

Saturday. 26. Darrell and I walked at Indian Creek in Madison. We are very familiar with this trail from the 13 years that we lived in the town. I love walking in the shade of large trees beside a stream. In this stream we get a sighting of a single and beautiful large water bird. We met up with our two sons Wes and Sam for lunch. They moved to this town with us in 2008 and have both stayed here. Wes is self-employed and lives in an apartment. Samuel is a computer programmer working as a contract employee at a friend’s company.He bought a house about a year after college and lives there with his cat.

Sunday. 27. We attend Capshaw church of Christ as we have for many years. We left in 2022 when we retired and went to England. We were out of the US for about 6-7 months and our church plan was to attend and be extremely temporary members of wherever we were living for the week. We have carried through with this plan and enjoyed visiting, meeting many beloved christian friends, and participating with many churches on our travels. Now we are coming back here to the Athens, Alabama area for more weeks during the year to visit 2 of our grandkids and get caught up on doctor appointments. Since we have completed our first two big dreams of living months in England and living months in New Zealand, we are now in what seems to be a transition of deciding what is next for us. Meanwhile we are fully participating members at Capshaw church, but only for a few weeks at a time.

Me Holding Esther at Her House

Sunset View From Our Duplex

Monday. 28. The grandkids and family have colds left over from the weekend. We go after dinner and walk with the kids to their playground.

Tuesday. 29. Today I had two doctors appointments. One for a sleep study because of my snoring. Last night I slept 7 hours straight, which is an improvement for me. My home sleep study is scheduled for my return to Athens in late January. Meanwhile I will keep doing my breathing exercises, my pelvic floor exercises and eating a low-sugar diet and less caffeine. So far my current improvements are quite good. 

Wednesday. 30. On a 2 hour phone call with my friend Laura today. We share together in our lives and encourage one another through study of the Bible, questions and practical living experiences together. 

Thursday. 31. We did one of our more strenuous workouts this morning. We call it Diamond Lite and it is an abbreviated 40 minute workout of DDP yoga. After breakfast I went shopping, donated some items at a thrift store, and got a hair cut. Darrell has a dental appointment this afternoon to finish a permanent cap. Darrell spent time online and on the phone getting some help desk to help him with a continually broken web site. This particular web site won’t remember or recognize his password from the last time he was on the site. He’s been on the phone several times since May and this is October. Each time there is hope that whatever is broken will get fixed and he can stop calling in for help. 

Friday. 1. Our final day and night at our current airbnb. Tomorrow morning we leave on our continuing nomadic journey heading toward the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida cruise port. Lunchtime babysit the grands for Eric and Erin to go out together. Last day packing issues and cleaning up. Deciding about Saturday breakfast at the airbnb or out? 

Darrell Reading to Esther (14 mos old)

Walking Path at Elkmont Heading Toward Athens

Fall Leaf Collection from Walk at Elkmont Trail

Halloween with Eric and Erin's Family. Owen is a Dracula. Esther is a Witch.

Nomad Notes.

Travel Planning: This week we have spent considerable time working through our February-April 2025 calendar. We decided on when we are coming back to Alabama and for how long. With our 5 week dates decided on, I continued to review properties in this area using the Airbnb app. We have stayed at several places. Each property has pros and cons and also different distances from our 2 Alabama grandkids house, which is our oldest son Eric and Erin’s place in Athens, Alabama. We also have a couple of house sits confirmed in our calendar for Calgary, Alberta in late April and Sequim, Washington in late June. We selected dates and an airbnb in Denton, Texas during March. This holds a space to visit Darrell’s 91 year old Dad and Mom who live with his sister. We have days and weeks open for traveling distances across the US and up into Canada all with no particular agenda yet. We each come up with travel or touring scenarios and we check into dates, prices and sit with the thoughts of our proposals and how that might feel to book it into our calendar. We turn down all of our prospective summer-fall 2025 proposals for now. We decide to leave days and weeks open between with no definite agenda yet. It feels right and completely doable at this time to let the calendar remain unscheduled. We are feeling confident that we don’t need to fill in our calendar with more specifics a year ahead and that certain days of travel we can plan our stays within a day or within a week keeping a very short time-line of where and when we are traveling and staying.

Name Recall: I practice names. I write down names. I rehearse learning names.I challenge my memory for people and their names. I’ve gotten better at recalling many people’s names. It is one of my relationship needs to love many people and to know many people by name and by their life stories.

Our Upcoming Calendar:

Drive to Ft. Lauderdale with 3-4 night stays. We have our first 3 night reservation at a Panama City Beach house/airbnb. We prefer a minimum of a 3 night stay to rest and be ready for our next drive. It’s about a 6 hour drive from Athens, Alabama to Panama City Beach. 6 hours is a little longer than we prefer to drive in one day, but we are doing it this time. There are two more Florida stays until November 13th when we are to board a 35 day antarctica cruise.

This cruise ends in Buenos Aires, Argentina on December 18th. From here we have air tickets to Brasilia, Brazil. We are returning here for our 2nd visit to our 3rd son Jeremy, daughter-in-law Andrea and 4 year old grandson Quinn. From Brasilia we fly back to the states on January 15th.

We are storing our truck in Ft. Lauderdale while we are out of the US. When we arrive back to the US we retrieve our truck and drive up to Georgia for a week. From there we are driving back to Athens, Alabama for 5 weeks in an airbnb rental house near our oldest son Eric, Erin and grands Owen and Esther. 

We have some other places and dates on our 2025 calendar set up. Past February 2025 we have a lot of undesignated days. We are waiting to get closer to dates before selecting and confirming our travel and stay reservations. 

Dieting: Darrell has been on his new diet and way of eating since September 14th. His need to drop some weight has effected some of what I am eating. We are doing well at this point. Darrell has lost 8-10 pounds. I’ve lost about 4. It’s way easier to cook for ourselves and stick to a diet than to eat out. Going on the road and then a month-long cruise and then a month at Jeremy’s house will all be challenging to keep eating how we are learning to eat now. I’ve tracked my foods since 2020. I did Noom for a full year. In 2021 after leaving noom, I found a free tracking app called mynetdiary that I’ve used since. I shared this app with Darrell and he is now using this app as his tracker. In general we are eating way more protein,good fats and carbs, less processed foods, and way less sugar. It’s so much easier to say no to junk when we are both wanting to say no. That goes for saying yes to exercising together too!

2008 Our family history and our move to Madison, Alabama: In 2007 we were living in Burlington, NC. We had moved there from St.Louis, Missouri about 6-7 years earlier. In 2007 Darrell came home from his job at LabCorp and said he doesn’t have a job anymore. He was ‘downsized’. Labcorp liked to surprise their employees with getting laid-off and telling them to clean out their desks on their way out today. It’s an abrupt end to a work relationship that leave the employee feeling very unappreciated and untrusted as they lose immediate access to all the work connections that they have daily been having. The really good things about Darrell losing his job was that he wasn’t liking his job and had been looking for another job for more than a year. He already had a couple of interviews lined up that would require us to relocate and we were willing to do what was needed to keep Darrell’s career moving forward. Darrell’s boss seemed to feel horrible about having to let him go, cut him out and take on the responsibilities that he was very good at and had spent months training her in. She knew this day was coming before he did and she was able to get him a 5 month severance package. Most people didn’t get that much during downsizing. It was a difficult time of feeling rejected but also taken care of and leaning into his faith that God knew our next move and where we would ultimately end up with our family of 3 sons still living at home. Eric, our oldest, had graduated from North Carolina State University and moved to Wichita, Kansas to train and then work as a preacher. 

Darrell and I had long conversations about his job possibilities, his ongoing searches for his applications, our finances, our budget, and our likely relocation. 

It turned out that his job search went for months. I think it was in month 9 or 10 after he was sent out the door at LabCorp that he got a call for an interview with Missile Defense in Huntsville, Alabama. He was sort of stunned and in his unemployed routine of looking for a job, applying for as many as he could and then trying to figure out who was calling him for a job interview. He said yes to the interview without immediately getting all of the details. The details came through and he flew to Huntsville for his interview. He was chosen for the job and within a few short weeks we had our Burlington house up for sale and our plan for relocating our family of 5 to Madison, Alabama. Our house didn’t sell for over a year. We continued to pay the mortgage. We lived in a rental apartment. Wes continued into his 3rd year of college in Huntsville while living at home and learning to manage his crohn’s diagnosis from a year or two earlier. Jeremy began his senior year of High School at Bob Jones (the astronaut) H.S. in Madison. Jeremy had asked us before we moved if he could stay in Burlington and take and offer to live with his Chick Fil-A manager and owner of the restaurant in town where he was working. We said no because we would miss having him with us. Samuel began his 10th grade year at Bob Jones H.S. I had an active massage therapy business in Burlington that I had reduced through the months up to our move. Once we arrived to Madison and moved into our rental apartment, I was able to find a location for beginning my massage business there. What a lovely year that is in my memory. Our three sons and Darrell are sure to have their own not as lovely memories, but I enjoyed being close together as we each had our own bedrooms. There was never a moment of going unseen in that little space. I enjoyed connecting with our sons and seeing them come and go daily to their schools. We had a very small living room and kitchen area. I remember that often Sponge Bob cartoons were playing in the living room. Everyone had access to a car except me. Darrell took some trips to Israel for his job. He was under stress to perform and he did excellent. In about a year we were able to find a house to move into in Madison. Soon after we moved into our house, our North Carolina house finally sold. Our sons helped get our house liveable as we were leaving the apartment and getting into a larger space. The house we bought took about 3 solid weeks of cleaning, painting every surface we could with Kilz, pulling out the stinky carpet and laying some wood flooring and some new carpet, and scraping popcorn ceilings to make them flat. Darrell’s folks were still active, skilled and young enough to come help us for a week or more. We emptied our storage units and got settled. Jeremy soon moved away to Tuscaloosa to begin college. Samuel was in 11th grade and Wes was finishing his last of 4 college years while living at home. We lived in this house until we sold it in September 2020. We moved to Alabama in July of 2008. We bought our house in July of 2009. We retired in March of 2022.