This Time It Was All About the Destination and Not the Journey

We Made it!

Most of our trips in the Winona Rider involve an amount of adventure and seeing new things while we take our time along the road.  This was not that kind of trip (See our previous blog).  Due to an inconsistent sensor in the van that kept us guessing, we just kept driving and focusing on the destination of Winona Lake.  I guess the Winona Rider really wanted to get back to the lake.

 After leaving the comfort of our condo in Boulder, we headed out to Ogallala, Nebraska.  We stayed at a cute brewery called Second Chapter.  The brewery is located in a 1927 building that had previously been the Goodall City Library.  The people at the brewery were very friendly and we enjoyed a Beer Sampler with creative names like the Witty Librarian, Trashy Romance, Czeched Out, Overdue Oatmeal Porter.  The book geek in me loved the names as much as the beer.  We walked the small town, enjoyed a local coffee shop in the morning, and felt pretty good about our chances of making it to Winona.  The starts warning had actually stopped beeping at us that day and we were feeling good!

We left the next morning and, no sooner than we had settled in, our Starts Warning began counting down and beeping at us again.  We went to nine and then, after a lunch and gas stop, to eight. Uh oh.  Time to regroup once more , reschedule our plans and get to Winona as soon as we could.  We added three extra hours to our day and camped out in a nice RV Park in Des Moines Iowa.  We have a lot of friends in Des Moines and would have liked to see them.  But, this was no time for using up our starts. The RV park was in the country so no trucks whizzing by this time.  Our minds were just on driving and getting to our destination at this point.

We had an eight-hour drive from Des Moines to Winona with the addition of Chicago traffic but we listened to a fun audio book called “Guncle” and kept focused on the destination.  On the way to Winona, the sensor messed with us again and went back up to 10 and then 16.  Whew. Clearly, this device does not know that I like to plan things years in advance and am very tried by not knowing what the next two hours will look like.  Definitely a lesson of living in the moment!

We arrived in Winona at 7:00 PM, high-fived and let out a big sigh of relief!  My poor husband also had to suffer with having a very challenging, nasty virus called the Adenovirus during our week.  The grandkids all had it before we left and as fate would have it, Brad got it half-way through the trip.  His throat was so swollen by the last day, he couldn’t talk.  I have never spent a day with Brad in my whole married life where he didn’t talk and tell me “interesting” facts and make his infamous eye-rolling puns (Editor’s note: They’re very funny).  It was eerily quiet.

We are at Winona now where we can take it easy for a few days and not drive!  (except for our boats and sailboat).  The Winona Rider goes into the shop in Ft. Wayne on Monday and Brad is on his way to improving with a bag full of meds and time to take it easy.  Let’s hope both the Rider and Brad find a way to heal together quickly!

We were both proud of how we handled this very mini crisis.  We worked together, considered our options, and reshuffled our plans based on what we knew at the time.  As we discussed in one of our blog posts last year, It Takes Two.  While our trip has gotten a bit upended, we still found a way to enjoy the journey – even though it really was about the destination this time!