Day 146 / 219 Use It Or Lose It

Saylorville Lake Sunny 84 Degrees

We are finally getting May weather! We had to wait till late July to get it, but that is how it goes in the Midwest. The temperature is influenced from so many different places you never know what you will get. The only thing we know for sure is that we will not endure an avalanche,  there are no mountains. And hurricanes will not make landfall here, even though they are known to drench us in several days of rain if they make landfall in Texas. Outside of that anything can and does happen here.

I have been thinking a lot about health and longevity lately. It occurred to me that people who work camp are general a healthy lot. Most fellow work campers I meet are fairly to obsessively health conscious. I have to wonder “Are people healthy because they work camp, or do they work camp because they are healthy?” Kind of a chicken and the egg question. I think it leans toward the latter and goes on because of the former to some extent.

Take our friends Will and Judy. They have been doing this for 18 years. They are both 79 years old and run circles around folks young enough to be their kids. That includes me, on both counts!

Full-time RV lifestyle is physically demanding weather you work camp or not. Just preparing to move, pulling (or driving) the thing from point A to point B, and setting back up is a lot of work. Even on full hook-ups you have to be able to dump your tanks once a week or so. We don’t walk into the garage like we did in our sticks and bricks home. We stoop down and stand on one leg, put our head under our armpit and reach over with the opposite arm to get a screwdriver out of the compartment. The roof needs attention regularly to maintain it.  It’s not a young mans game crawling up the ladder and hoisting yourself on the roof to clean off the AC vents, clean out the little gutters or sweep the mulberries off so they don’t stain the roof purple.

I’m learning quickly, widowhood rarely takes the surviving spouse off the road. They just carry on. But a progressive chronic illness in one half of a couple or a single person will take them off the road right now. Staying healthy is on the minds of all of us. We all have our different methods. At the root of it is what we all want no matter how we live. Quality of life for how ever many years we get on this earth, or on the road in our case.

Until next time…