Friends & Family – Page 2 – The Destinators

Menifee, CA

My aunt Marcelle, one of my dad’s 15 siblings, was a party girl. Despite having 5 kids, she and my uncle Jerry held at least one major family reunion each summer. My cousin Rachel was about my age, and her brother Brian was close to my brother’s age. The youngest of the brothers, Gary, was 10 years younger than me so when I was about 10, we older girls thought it was fun to hang around with the new baby, forming a bond that lasted over the next few years so we got to know each other pretty well. (Youngest daughter Sharon was born when I was in college and has lived in New England her whole life, so I only got to know Sharon when we were both a good bit older.) And in between, in kind of a no-man’s land, there was Keith.

Malibu, CA: VT-ID connection

We’ve been friends with Harry and Karen since early in our CT days, when they lived in NY. Our shared history is well explained in this post from 2017, when we visited Harry and Karen at their current home in Boise, but here is a summary: Along with friends Pat and Geoff, we all used to do a fair amount of mountain biking and off-road tandem riding around the northeast, and for a number of years (right up until Sue and I started transitioning to Vermonters) we enjoyed a series of ski trips out west together. Visits slowed down once priorities changed (careers for us, and add raising families for the them). Now, well into retirement (us) or recently retired (them) and all the kids now grown, who knows what might happen next?

Rancho Palos Verdes – reunion

We all met on the same day – June 23, 1984. Judy, Doug and I (along with 9 other excited bicyclists) arrived in Portland, OR for the start of TransAm Eastbound 0624, a bike tour organized by Bikecentennial (now Adventure Cycling). Self-supported, we’d pedal our bikes across the country from Portland to Virginia Beach, carrying all our own gear on the bikes, for the next 90 days. You do get to know people pretty well by being together on the road, through super highs and lows, in that much time!

BGU/DEN: Parker, CO

Blues Guitar Unleashed regional jams have been a regular enough feature in this blog that I’m not going to open this post with another explanation of what they are (although if you need that, see my posts from last year or the year before that). Beginning last December my friend and fellow musician Bob (aka BobbyUT) has been making and tweaking all the necessary arrangements for our gang of blues brothers and sisters to get together this fall in his hometown of Parker, Colorado, just south of Denver, for 4-1/2 days of music and mayhem. That event took place last week, and history was made. Again.

Parker, CO

As mentioned in Doug’s post, the uncertainty of how long we’d be waiting for RV repair was unnerving. Sitting day after day in a dimly lit hotel room with only a bed and 2 chairs at the Quality Inn behind the Mercedes repair center would get old fast. And although we were surrounded by shopping malls with a huge choice of chain restaurants, the prospect of visiting those twice a day for more than a couple of days had limited appeal. We needed a change of attitude, a plan B. After all, people fly into Denver for vacation all the time without RVs. What do they do? What could we do without our RV?

St Louis and Columbia

Photo of the 150-year old Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River (Missouri History Museum)

A favorite part about being in the midwest is catching up with members of my family that we don’t get to see very often. With the A/C saga behind us, we aimed for Missouri where temps were forecasted to hover around 100. Does the outdoor thermometer on the RV get to 3-digit numbers?

Ashtabula and Ostrander, OH, thoughts on route-finding, and the Great Air Conditioner Saga of 2025

Sue recently pointed out that our approach to route-finding often places a much higher priority on visiting different places to do interesting things with great people than it does on efficiency or saving time or following a direct route. These priorities brought us not only to Cincinnati, but also to the two Ohio towns in the title of this post.

I want to point out that I am writing perhaps three posts in one right now. The two visits in this post sandwiched the visit in the previous post and the A/C saga spans all three of those, as well as the one before that. In the past, we’ve tried to remain chronologically consistent in our posts, but this shouldn’t be too hard to follow. Still, please pay attention!

Cincinnati – deux

We headed out from the Drumeo meetup in Hamilton, ON, nominally en route to this year’s upcoming Blues Guitar Unleashed live jam near Denver, CO. Now, a direct route between Hamilton, ON and Denver wouldn’t normally go through Cincinnati. Fortunately, we don’t care about direct routes nearly as much as we do about going different places and seeing different people, and we love getting together with my piano buddy Honghong. Last year’s visit was way too much fun, so there’s no chance we’d pass up another opportunity!

Set course for Cincinnati!

Pasadena, CA

When we moved to Connecticut in 1990, I worked on a team at The Travelers that was lead by Dwight. A firm believer in team-building, he and his wife Colleen hosted several team dinners at their home in Essex, CT, and we got to know Colleen as well. For the next few years, I thoroughly enjoyed the ground-breaking work we did in managed care. and I learned so much – about the healthcare/health insurance business, business politics, project management, people management, team-building – all skills that served me well when I later started my own business. Thank you, Dwight!

Sedona

We last visited Sedona in 2017 to see our long-time friends Malcolm and Judy, not long after they had retired and moved from New Jersey to AZ. They showed us around their new hometown and the surrounding areas, and, just as we always have, we looked forward to the next time we could get together. Then, in May 2021, Judy passed away. Her death was sudden and unexpected and very difficult for all who knew her, and we were deeply concerned for Malcolm, who’d lost his life partner of 49 years. Malcolm visited with us in VT later that summer on an east coast tour of visits with friends and countless private celebrations of Judy’s life, as he began to heal.

We were excited when we learned that Malcolm had met a wonderful woman, that they’d fallen deeply in love and were embarking together on a new chapter in their lives. Malcolm and Lita were married in May 2023, and we were eagerly awaiting our visit to meet and get to know Lita! Oh, and also Lita’s dog (now Malcolm’s step-dog) Cali.