I was going to title this post, “The Year of the Cancelled
Vacations,” a phrase that Alan and I had each come up with independently of each other over
the past week or so. But it was so darn
depressing that I couldn’t do it, no matter how accurate a title it was.
Right after the first of the year, I cancelled all the
reservations we had for our spring trip to the southern states because we found
out that our son’s long-time girlfriend would be graduating with her Master’s degree
on one of the Saturdays in May we had planned to be away. That’s one of the pitfalls of travel planning
more than a year in advance. (We ended
up swapping our 2019 scheduled trip for one we were hoping to take in 2020 and
it worked out just fine - more on that at another time.) Then, in June when we had returned to our #1
favorite campground (Northampton Beach on Great Lake Sacandaga in central New
York), and watched the rain come down day after day after day, we decided to
cancel our fall camping plans at another State Park so that we could come back
and (with good-weather luck!) have a chance at enjoying our favorite lake one
last time before our camping season ended.
In my last post about the Outdoors RV Owners East Coast Rally, I noted
that we almost had to cancel that trip a couple of weeks ago due to a
malfunctioning trailer brake system. All
of those situations were minor bumps in the road compared to the major pothole
we hit as our 40th wedding anniversary drew near.
