The past two or three weeks we have been planning and getting excited for a few weeks down South somewhere where it is warm and sunny. We spent time cleaning out Hannah Savanna, our traveling van, and looking at maps and figuring places to go and see in the South.
I even went online and bought a 500 page book that covers all the national parks and monuments in the USA. I never knew there were so many national parks in the US! I looked throughout Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Trying to pick places to see was like when being a kid in a candy store. There are just that many places to see in our country.
We finally had it narrowed down to the SouthWest part of the country and so I made a list of places we’d be driving by and places not too far out of the way. And there were many. It sure didn’t seem like we’d be at a lack of seeing the sights. And we could take up to 3 weeks before we needed to be back home. And then it happened.
We started listening to the weather reports closely for where we were planning to go…and it was pretty much one storm after another that was supposed to go through right where we were planning to go. At least for a good part of our time down South. The temps would be in the 30-40 range at night and just in the 40-50’s in the day.
After looking at that and then looking at the Minnesota weather it wasn’t much of a change. Our weather was going to be in the 30-40’s range in the daytime. Enough to at least not feel like we were shut in.
So once again we sat at the kitchen table weighing the pros and cons of taking a trip South in the next few weeks. And after doing the gas math we made a decision that it wasn’t really worth driving down South to be in similar weather to what we are having right now here in Minnesota. We just sat together at the table shaking our heads and feeling a bit disgusted and dejected.
Trying to justify staying home, I looked at the recent bank account balance and realized over the past week or two we had spent much of the money we were going to use on the trip.
My driver’s license was due, we had to transfer the title of a recent new used vehicle and we had to pay out the first three months of me starting on Medicare. We also had to pay into state taxes this year and pay the tax guy. Like I said, it was just about what we had allocated for the trip South.
That realization did help us decide that a trip South isn’t in our plans this Winter. We had planned a Winter trip and then a Summer trip to see the kids and grandkids out West. If we wanted to do that, it was in our best interest to stay in Minnesota until the out West trip in the Summer.
So here we are still in the winter wonderland of Minnesota and making plans for some cheap day trips around the state. So stay tuned, maybe we’ll be coming to you from someplace else in Minnesota. We dug out the Minnesota map and are making new plans to see maybe some things around Minnesota we haven’t seen before or in a really long time.
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