Getting organized for a trip of this length is keeping me up at night. Lists, Lists, Lists. They are everywhere. Medications, we are all on so many. Mail, how to keep it going to the right places and bills how to get them paid. Who will look out for the house, for the yard, for our life here at home, while we are exploring?

It is a puzzle, but we are all working out the pieces and hopefully in seven weeks when we form up the caravan and drive off into the sunrise, we will have a clear and definite plan to address all of the aforementioned problems.

Then there is the budget. They always say if you have to worry about gasoline prices, you shouldn't buy an RV, but when we bought ours, a gallon wasn't pushing $3.50 a gallon. Now it is a concern. Towing a car we will get only 8 miles to the gallon and I would say filling up that 75 gallon tank daily is going to cause everyone some second thoughts.

So we have decided to get to a central destination, unhook, and take our little tow cars exploring, therefore minimizing the gas we need. We have several stays of seven days and will try to see as much of the area as possible in each of these regions.

Reading and researching, we realize there is more to see and explore than any human could in one short trip. It would take a lifetime to do the West justice and absorb all the beauty and mystery of this awesome region, but we will go as much as we can go and do as much as we can do.

Seventy years of living has tought me to live in the moment and enjoy each day to the fullest and hopefully we will all stay healthy and be able to mazimize our time on this trip of a lifetime. How fortunate we all are that God has given us this wonderful opportunity.

Got to go and make more lists.

We all are retired and over 60 years young. We own motorhomes and each of us have wanted to take a trip to our nation's glorius West. We live in a 55 plus community and are active in many endeavors, but travel is something which means so much to all of us. To see the wonders of the West has always been our dream, so we decided to do it.

Why we decided to do it this year with sky rocketing gas prices and falling stock portfolios, is a mystery, but at our ages we don't have the luxury of time. so we decided to just DO IT.

We all belong to an RV club called the " Happy Campers "and we go out each month with other members and enjoy their company and good times and we are blessed to be friends, so we decided, it is OUR time. It will be more comfortable to tour with a group and there is a safety and a comfort in traveling with friends.

We started planning the trip for two months, but as we talked and found more and more places to explore, the trip got longer and longer and is now up to 80 days and over 5000 miles.

We have the challenge of living in Florida, so it will take us quite a few days to get to the West,
so on the way we decided to take in some of the things we each want to see. We all agreed on
Branson, Missouri as our first long stay, so we will head there first and take in the shows.

We are now meeting to make reservations in the more popular places and right now we have Branson, Yellowstone, some of the national parks in Utah and Las Vegas made. We have identified campgrounds we think we would enjoy from the many directories we have and each of us has a note book filled with places we want to see , campgrounds, and maps. Lots of maps.

How did our fore fathers do it without all of this preparation. They just got in the wagons , hired some one who looked like John Wayne to be the trail master and off they went.

Welcome to the adventure of a life time.

This is my blog which will be coming from our Westward Ho trip. A 80 day trek into the west by three elderly couples, driving very large motorhomes, a vitual wagon train with flat screen tv's and convection ovens.

We leave on this adventure on May 4,2008, so stay in touch as we prepare and for our trip.