Not every Story is a Foreshadow

We have reached the 50 day mark. Short story, we are a little past the one third mark, we have adjusted to smaller quarters, learned how to make the necessary tedious tasks take up less time than they did when we started, and laughed about it all. And along the way we have met a lot of nice people. When you stay in an RV park, even for just a night, the RV next to you is truly your next door neighbor. And if you have lived in various homes over a lifetime, then you know that some neighbors become friends but only until one of you move. Some, you just say hi when you see them, and that’s it. I’ll ignore the bad neighbors, because, so far we have yet to encounter any.

With other RV campers, the subject is easy, RVing. How to cope with the problems that come up with a mobile house. Just rattling along America’s crumbling highways, puts all the intricate components of a house at risk. But at other times we have met people just at random, like the young lady we chatted with in a bar in Austin, TX. We had watched the bats fly out by the thousands from underneath a bridge right in downtown Austin. This is a daily event, the bats live all day under the bridge and just after sunset they emerge. As the sky is darkening hundreds, maybe thousands of small bats come zooming out almost right underneath your feet. And every day, thousands of people stand along the bridge and the parks at either end of the bridge, waiting anxiously to see bats fly out, circle around, then return to under the bridge. A short time later they extend their journey out to the greenery that lines the Colorado River as it flows through Austin. This happens nearly continuously for about 15 minutes, perhaps longer, but by then it is too dark to make out the bats.

So after watching this natural show right in the heart of a big city, we took a walk and found a restaurant with a bar and went in for a drink. As can happen, the woman sitting next to me made some remark to the bar tender which I tossed in my two cents and in only a few moments Shirley and I found ourselves having a chat with her. We told her about our RV cross-country trip and she told us a story from her life. Her parents having both retired, immediately set off on an RV trip. Her parents story differed from ours in an important way. They never adjusted to mutual retirement, we waited over a year of mutual retirement before engaging in such a long RV trip. Her parents RV trip lasted only a couple of weeks and they ended up divorced.  The moral here is that well after a month, Shirley and I still like each other, and the journey has been a wonderful experience for both of us.