We had been planning to hold off retiring until my birthday next year, but changes in circumstances have prompted us to go ahead and retire this year. So as of February 23, 2024 Ron is officially retired.
Ron’s teammates at HEB held a retirement celebration for him a couple days before then, and Shelley was able to attend also. Even better, Ron’s boss Pat surprised him with an HEB Swoon award. His coworkers had a lot of nice things to say about him. It was really nice, and a great send off.
Ron’s retirement celebration and award presentation
So What’s Up Now?
First Ron is going to need to wrap his head around the fact the he doesn’t have to work anymore. He’s started working on establishing healthy routines: daily walking, exercise, Spanish lessons, and practicing piano. He’s also enjoying getting around to doing some RV projects that he never seemed to have time to do before.
Travel?
It feels weird, but we have decided that we’re tired of hauling the RV all over the country. We’ve been very blessed to be able to do a lot of that over the past 13 years, but we think we’re going to do more flying. We love living in the RV, so we’re not planning on getting a house or apartment or anything like that. And we still love to travel, but Shelley’s health currently limits how long we can be away. She gets an infusion every 3 weeks, so we’ll be doing shorter trips, and probably flying.
Living in Liberty Hill, TX
At the end of 2023 we moved further out into the country to Liberty Hill. It is still a fairly small town with that great small town feel, but it’s growing quickly so we don’t know how long that will last. We had initially moved to the LHTX Rv Resort, planning on spending summers in Windsor, Ontario. But that won’t really work with the new treatment schedule. That means that we’re going to be spending summers in Texas, so we had to find some shade to park the RV under. Luckily, there was a shady spot available at the Rio Bonito RV resort nearby, so we booked it and moved in within a month. We’re planning on staying here for a while.
Since we’re not going to be towing the RV all over the country, we don’t really need the expensive monster truck anymore. So we’ve decided to sell the truck once we’ve gotten all our stuff moved to where we need it. If we want to move to another RV park we can hire someone to do that for us. We’ll still want a 2nd vehicle as a backup, so we (er, Ron) decided to get something fun like a Miata.
We’ve also found a new church home: The Grove here in Liberty Hill. Ron has joined the Men’s bible study group, and he is looking for other ways to get plugged in. We don’t know if he’ll be joining the worship team or whether God has something new and different for him. Shelley is still building up her strength after some health setbacks, but the outlook is very good and the progress so far has been amazing. Thank you everyone that has been praying for her, it’s working. It shouldn’t be long before she becomes more active also.
God is being very good to us. What a blessed life we have!