Making Up Vacation Ground

What’s your current status as to allotting time to travel?  

“Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey.” (Babs Hoffman)

Getting away for travel can be a monumental task when unresolved issues linger on at home. So consider my mother’s recent transition to “Assisted Living”. It seemed logical at first that we’d stay on a predictable time schedule similar to what we had done with our own condo transition last December. For Ruth and I had worked smoothly as a team then in handling such tasks as moving our possession efficiently and setting up a usable method to finance such an effort.

Yet what ultimately proved however to “bog me down” on mother’s move centered around those unforeseen events of costly time delays each day that tested my patience to the “max”. Take for example that I’d failed to realize the considerable number of address changes I needed to make for mother’s active accounts. Compounding that issue, I’d also underestimated the time difficulty I would need to complete each of them online.

One glaring example of this problem happened when I attempted to secure my mother’s “VA” pension information from my late father’s military past. Notably, why did I need to elaborate on the phone verbatim to the agent specific details about his war service in World War II to make a simple clerical alteration? For what reason did I also need to confirm the first day he entered the military for instance? I can similarly report how a nightmarish waste of time I faced to contact Social Security directly lingered on for days until at the last moment I discovered by googling that there existed a simple form to fill out for mailing the required  information. 

An equally puzzling task happened when private company security protocols required me to recall exact answers to security questions like the first four letters of my mother’s favorite elementary teacher or a similar recall of what label she called  her first childhood pet. If the wrong answers were given, the agent would not talk to me about my mother’s accounts. So when such access was denied, I decided to mail each company a copy of my “power of attorney” form, which further delayed me for up to two weeks in gaining access to her official records.

Along a similar vein, what I would describe as communicative “mumble jumbo” slowed me down daily with such seemingly routine matters as (1) obtaining my mother’s ID status and/or her current login information, 2) transferring her health records efficiently and (3) mediating disagreements between family/friends concerning what personal items of hers to keep, box, or send to “Goodwill”. Thus feeling overwhelmed by these tasks, it seemed that I bounced around playing the simulated role of lawyer, doctor, and family counselor each day. In turn, my sleep schedule also suffered.

Don’t get me wrong! I’ve certainly realized that these official actions I’ve described above were necessary. But certainly a more time friendly approach for me as a family caregiver should have been respected. Perhaps then the best way to look at my arduous effort for several months in humanistic terms can justify that she’s now happily settled into her new apartment routine in more caring and economical living conditions.        

So the timing’s finally right for Ruth and me to take off on our delayed California bound road trip. Our clockwise route in April through early May thus hopefully will bring calmer spring weather conditions than if we’d left months ago as planned. So stay tuned in as I report as usual my curious minded array of travel blogs from various regions around this country in the upcoming weeks.Take a look at the our itinerary covering twenty one stopover sites in the cover photo above.