Hi there! It sure has been a while. Thanks for stopping by after all this time. For those of you who followed our RV journey back in 2017-18, I’m sorry the blog just suddenly fizzled out. Once we settled into the rhythm of the trip and living in the moment, it was just too hard to keep up. The technology I had at the time was more a hindrance than help. It became time-consuming and frustrating to be constantly challenged by technical issues. Once a couple of weeks had gone by without posting, I found I didn’t really have the energy or desire to deal with the technology or even write or share. So, the blog crashed and burned without a word.

I enjoyed writing and sharing, so I kept the abandoned blog, and I planned that when we resumed our travels, I’d have figured out all the issues and start posting again. I returned to work after a while to save up some more money. I never dreamed we’d go over five years without traveling again. A journey doesn’t have to mean traveling, though. The fact is, we’ve been on quite a journey together since 1995! We’ve even called it “Kevin & Kate’s Great Adventure” for the past 27 years. That journey was intense at times, as it has been over the past year, and we never really went far from home during that time!

Mom

Most of our time and energy was spent over the past year preparing to get my 96-year-old Mom moved from New Jersey to Indiana to live with us. Our plan had previously been to move to NJ, but we decided that NJ is way too expensive to make that work for us. I was amazed when I asked my 96-year-old mother, who never lived anywhere but Morris County, New Jersey, to come to Indiana to live with us and she quickly agreed. I had expected that it would require negotiation.

So, I retired again (this time for good!) and we spent lots of time converting a storage room and an office into a bedroom and private sitting room for Mom; we painted, installed new carpet, bought a crazy-expensive adjustable Sleep Number bed because I wanted her to have pressure support and be able to raise her head due to her COPD, researched doctors and oxygen suppliers, and did a truckload of other things.

We went back to my hometown of Morristown, NJ, where Mom was. In a flurry of activity over a couple of days, packed up her apartment into a U-Haul truck, and threw out decades of accumulated stuff. We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at her favorite restaurant, Guerriero’s. (If you are ever in Morristown, NJ, and in the mood for some wonderful home-style Neapolitan Italian food, go there! Don’t hesitate. Just go. You’ll thank me later!) This wonderful photo of my mom and my nephew, Melvin, was taken there last year.

Anyway, back to our story. (But really. They serve awesome food. Go there.)

After all this and the tearful goodbyes, we drove Mom back here to Indiana to live with us.

We got to enjoy five weeks of cooking and shopping together and sitting on the porch listening to the birds, and looking at the flowers and golf course, playing cards and Scrabble, and just talking. We explored her new hometown of Connersville, IN a bit. Then Mom got pneumonia.

After arguing with me, she finally agreed to let us take her to the ER. She was admitted to Reid Hospital. Initially, it looked like she might be responding well to the antibiotics, but then things took a turn for the worse. We learned that she had a three-inch tumor in her lung. That told me there was likely only one expected outcome of this hospitalization, and Mom would probably not be coming home.

As a hospice nurse for many years, I wanted to handle things in a certain way, but she had other ideas. I always felt my most important obligation to my hospice patients was to facilitate them taking charge of their own lives as they were facing death, and to respect and support their decisions, even if I secretly wished they made different choices. Now, here I was having a similar conversation with my own mother and had to use all my strength to fight the urge to take charge. We did it Mom’s way. In typical Shirley fashion, she chose to “not go gently into that good night.” That’s just something I had to accept even though I knew she was fighting a losing battle. When I asked her if she wanted me to call a priest to give her the sacrament of the sick, she gave me an incredulous look and smacked my hand (one of the several smacks I got from her that week.) I remembered that about 20 years ago, when she was hospitalized and very sick, a priest came to her room to offer her the sacrament. She “threw the priest out of the room,” as she put it. “I am NOT dying, ” she had told him.

A sympathetic hospitalist physician agreed to help me respect Mom’s wishes. I had to look away when they were poking and digging trying to get arterial blood to test her blood gases. I remember how much that hurt. I kept telling her, “You don’t have to go through all this, Mom. We can stop all this.” “Keep going,” was her response each time. Within hours after the last time she said those words, she was gone.

When Mom died, it took a while to get everything all sorted out. It took longer because I was feeling drained, exhausted, and very sad. I was so grateful to Kevin for taking the lead on a lot of what needed to be done. There were death certificates to deal with, arranging transportation of her body back to New Jersey to be buried, the funeral, the memorial booklet, and the list seemed unending, and expensive.

Now, five months later, except for a few things that I brought to New Jersey for family, her belongings remain in her room. I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of them yet. I’ve set a goal for the end of the year. We’ll see how that goes. Next Spring, I’ll have her headstone and my big brother Joe’s, who is also buried in the same family plot, installed.

What Now?

Once all that was settled, the time eventually came when I was able to function after coming to terms with the reality that I outlived all of my siblings and both of my parents. One day, I asked Kevin, “Well, what now?” We had expected to spend the next couple of years focused on Mom and providing her with the best possible life in her last years. We hadn’t expected that to be over in less than two months. We had to reconnect with what our own goals had been. We quickly landed on travel as something we’ve always looked forward to in retirement. Now, here we are, both of us finally really-most-sincerely-retired, with no other responsibilities. Why not?

We’ve decided our first trip will be the trip I’ve wanted to take since I was a child. We’re going to Ireland next May and we’ll be staying for almost a month! After that, we’ll plan a trip to Italy, which is Kevin’s number one travel dream destination, and a top three on my list as well.

I learned when we took our long RV trip that I loved sharing our thoughts and experiences while we were on the road. When I was presented with technical difficulties that began to make it cumbersome, time-consuming, and took a lot of the joy out of it, I just gave up. I began to think about how I might maintain a travel blog without it interfering with our enjoyment of our travel. I’m still working through exploring newer technology to make that happen.

Blog Plan

I guess by now it’s clear that I’ve decided to reboot the blog now. The idea came to me a few weeks ago. I had been researching the history of Aran Sweaters and found myself writing about what I learned. A fellow Irish language (Gaeilge) student and I got talking about them and some of the myths surrounding them, so I shared what I had written. She really enjoyed reading it and asked if she could share it with some friends. She encouraged me to write more. Another similar exchange with her and another student about the Tuatha Dé Danann, an ancient supernatural race of people/gods who were said to have inhabited Ireland before the coming of the ancestors of the modern Irish, led to them telling me, “You really should start a blog about this stuff!”

To be honest, I may not have anything new to say about the things I write about, so I was not really sure whether to do this or not, but after thinking about it, I’ve decided to go ahead and share my thoughts and research and stories. Since most of my recent research is related to Ireland in preparation for our trip next year, that’s mostly what I’ve been thinking and writing about lately. So, those posts will provide some background that I can refer to in the shorter posts I make on our trip. I can limit the time I spend writing during our travels and spend more time living in the moment. That is one step towards keeping the blog from crashing and burning again!

Next week, I’ll be beginning with a 4-part series on Aran Sweaters. (Well, I hope it will be four parts. I’ve only written two so far! It might be three with a follow-up during or after our trip.) I’ll also be writing about the Irish language which I have been trying to learn, and Irish myths, folklore, music, people, and places. Those stories will help readers to understand the significance of some of the sites we’ll be visiting. I’ve loved learning about myths and legends since I was a child and first learned to fear the pooka (púca,) who I thought of at the time as the Boogey Man’s Irish cousin, and the banshee (bean sí !) When that new information led to my being afraid to go to sleep, one of our Irish friends or neighbors explained to me that they mostly just hung out in Ireland, not New Jersey, so I’d probably be fine. Now that I’ll be visiting Ireland, I wonder…

I think I’ll start a regular series – Friday Folklore or Monday Mythology, or both! We’ll see what that turns out to be! If there’s something you’d like me to write about, just let me know.

The journey, for now, will be a thought-journey, leading up to the actual journey we’ll make next May to Ireland.

I hope you’ll come along!

Slán go fóill agus beannacht, (Bye for now and blessings,)

Kate

Sometimes I get carried away with deep diving into a topic, so when I am aware I am getting into a lot of detail, I’ll try to move them down under this heading to give you an alert so you can skip the minutiae if you’d like!

At the request of a fellow Irish language student, I’ll be linking many of the Irish-language words to a glossary entry. I am not even close to fluent, so take what I post with a grain of salt! I’m sharing with you what I’ve only recently learned! Here is a link to the glossary index page, while I figure out how to better link it. If you have any corrections or comments, please feel free to comment on anything I post. I welcome feedback.