WheRVe we been? Our (lack of) travels, 2nd quarter 2020

I thought I’d be tapping out this quarterly update from the UP, at a rustic campground in Marquette, where we’d planned to spend this week with friends.

But… pandemic pause.

Every event we’d registered for between July and September, between Michigan and Washington, was canceled.

So we’re still in Texas, waiting to tie up a few loose ends, and trying to figure out what’s next.

I feel a few of you nodding your heads and smirking in solidarity, and I appreciate that we’re not alone in having our plans change, and change, and change again during this pandemic.

We are thankful that for us this endurance test has so far been only inconvenient and frustrating, not devastating.

We didn’t lose jobs, we didn’t watch the jobs we did have become an unrecognizable marathon of awkward teleconferences, and we didn’t have to monitor our children’s online schooling.

Hell, we didn’t even have to explain the pandemic to our kids. Every day. In a hundred different ways. To infinity. Some of you did, and probably still are, and you deserve all the top shelf margaritas.

And we’ve remained virus-free, as have our family members.

Those are all very precious gifts.

So now that all the gratitude’s been typed out loud, here’s my briefest quarterly update ever.

Here’s another telling image for ya. Below is a screen cap of my notes for our quarterly travels, recording each place we slept and approximate miles traveled.
1st quarter 2020: 17 stops
2nd quarter 2020: just the 3
For the past year, we’ve made between 11 and 18 stops per quarter. Ack.

April: We were supposed to be in San Antonio for all our routine annual medical and dental appointments, but every single one was canceled or switched to a phone consult (by our providers, not us), so we stayed on as camp hosts at Kerrville-Schreiner Park for a few more weeks — our third spring season there.

May: We were exactly where we were supposed to be! We’d signed up in July of 2019 to spend the month of May 2020 volunteering at Escapees CARE, a unique respite facility for RV’ers in Livingston, TX. We were worried that the pandemic quarantine would preclude our being able to serve, but we got the all-clear, and that resulted in one of the most gratifying workamping gigs we’ve ever experienced. Here’s where you’ll find my words and pics.

June: We were supposed to be checking some middle states off our travel map as we made our way to a few scheduled stops in MI and WI, but instead, we re-booked almost all the appointments we’d had to skip (see April), and came back to our home base of San Antonio. It’s dog breath hot, and the city’s become a COVID-19 quagmire, but we got the most important pokes, prods, and scans done before things started shutting down again, and we’ve been able to see family and friends in small groups — good medicine, both.

Where to next: We’ll probably try making our way north, to spend some time cooling off in the mountains of CO, MT, WY and/or UT. Following each state’s rules for COVID-19 prevention is a priority, and we will take great care to make sure we travel safely. Or we might just throw our hands in the air and forget about it, and give in to the universe’s persistent nagging that this summer we should probably just stay put. You’ll find out when I blog about this quarter in October.

Or you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and/or Twitter for updates as we go (or don’t).

Please stay well, y’all. Please.

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We started full-timing in August of 2015, but I didn’t think to do an annual review until the end of 2016, and it was just a listing on Facebook of places we’d visited. After that, I started using a quarterly format.

• 1Q 2020
• 4Q 2019
• 3Q 2019
• 2Q 2019
• 1Q 2019
• 4Q 2018
• 3Q 2018
• 2Q 2018
• 1Q 2018
• 4Q 2017 (doubles as 3rd installment of our Amazon Camperforce write-up)
• 3Q 2017
• 2Q 2017
• 1Q 2017
• 2016