Should We Stay or Should We Go

  Today I’m off to Alberta. I’m heading out with three friends for a quick little trip to celebrate our friend Michele’s 70th birthday. Four women, five days in the Rockies, and, undoubtedly, lots of laughs along the way. The road between Banff and Jasper is spectacular. Even though I’ve made the trip before, I never get tired of seeing the Canadian Rockies.  I’m usually up for doing some hiking and exploring off the beaten track. However, this time around it will be a little more laid back. I know we’ll be taking longer lunches, doing some shopping and enjoying some scenic drives. Hopefully, we’ll also get lucky and see some bears and moose along the way. Even though it will be a shorter trip, I’m looking forward to sharing one of the most beautiful places on Earth with good friends. I hope to find to to blog along the way, so stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll have some stories, photos and maybe a little Alberta adventure to share with you while we’re there. Alberta, here we c...

I recently read an article about something called the 12 good years , and I've been thinking about it ever since. I had never heard the term before. The basic idea is that once we reach 60, we may have about twelve years when we are still healthy and active enough to do many of the things we enjoy doing. Travel, walk, hike, explore, climb stairs, carry our luggage, and generally get out there and do things without our bodies getting in the way too much. Twelve years. Twelve years! From 60!  When I first read that, I thought, that’s not very long at all . And then, of course, I did the math.  I’m soon turning 65. At the time we retired at the end of 2019, I thought we had lots of time ahead of us. We had plans. We were going to travel, explore and finally have the freedom to do some of the things we'd talked about doing while we were still working. Then a few months later, COVID happened. Needless to say, those first couple of years of retirement didn't exactly go ac...

  There’s a place in Southern Ontario, less than an hour’s drive from Toronto, where you can feel like you’ve suddenly landed somewhere else. The landscape is so unusual that it’s hard to believe you’re still in Ontario, let alone Canada. The Cheltenham Badlands are a series of rolling red hills and deep gullies surrounded by the green countryside of Caledon. We have visited many times over the years, and even though we know what we’re going to see, I still find myself stopping to take it all in. We’ve visited by car, but we’ve also arrived by bicycle a couple of times while riding the Caledon Trailway, and taking a short detour off the trail. I really like approaching the Badlands that way. You’re cycling through the quiet countryside, and then suddenly this strange red landscape appears. It’s quite a contrast. What Exactly Are the Cheltenham Badlands? The story of the Badlands goes back a very long way. More than 450 million years ago, this area was covered by an ancient sea...

  Where did the summer go? This is the last unofficial week of summer. The kids go back to school next Tuesday. Where did the time go? I had so many plans for this summer, and somehow a lot of them just seemed to evaporate. We spent very little time at the trailer. In fact, I’ve only been down to the beach once all summer, which seems almost impossible. We did a little bike riding, but certainly not as much as we usually do. I’ve been trying to figure out what took up all the time. Then I started adding it all up. I was away for almost a week crafting with friends, which was definitely time well spent. But a big part of the summer was taken up with getting my mother moved into her new assisted living home and helping her get settled. And when I say “getting settled,” I mean everything that comes along with a move. There was cleaning out her old apartment, appointments with her old doctor and her new doctor, getting her TV and phone set up, taking her shopping multiple times, taking...

If you could eliminate one household chore from your life permanently, what would it be? Not put it off. Not hire someone to do it occasionally. Not magically make it easier.   I mean gone. You would never have to do it again. For me, this is an easy one. Grocery shopping. Hands down. I loathe grocery shopping. And it's not just the actual shopping. It's the whole process. First, I have to figure out what we need.  This sounds simple enough, except somehow the answer is always, "I don't know. What do you want to eat this week?"  How am I supposed to know what I want to eat five days from now?  I can plan, but then on the day I don’t have an appetite for that meal. (Or feel like making it). Then comes the list. Then the trip to the grocery store. Then pushing the cart up and down every aisle while trying to remember what we came for, looking at the list a hundred times, avoid buying things we don't need and figure out how to make our grocery budget str...