Spring again

It is hard to believe that we are already through another cycle and back to where we started. Much has changed; much has remained the same. My mother is still dealing with the pain from her post-herpetic neuralgia; Bob's father is slipping more and more into the world of Alzheimer's. We are planning a bike trip that we didn't fully expect.

Usually we do a long bike trip every other year; we're planning to pick up where we left off in Pueblo, CO in June of 2008 and possibly ride all the way back to Pittsburgh. Adventure Cycling is right now opening the Underground Railroad Trail which will help us greatly.

This year, however, we have tickets to London! We are going to leave for London at the end of June to visit with our friends Chris and Roger and John and Beverly. We will spend about 10 days there, including the Prologue race of the Tour de France. Then with Chris and Roger we will take a train to Dover and a ferry to Dunkirk. From Dunkirk we will ride with them to Amsterdam. They will have to leave us in Amsterdam in order to return to London for their granddaughter's christening. We will continue almost in a straight line east to Hannover, Germany to visit with Bob's cousin Joe and his wife Karin.

We'll fly from Bremen back to London for three more days and then return home. So we'll be gone almost all of July. We hadn't planned to take such a long trip, but the opportunity presented itself and we decided to grab it. If Chris, Roger, John and Bev lived here we'd all be best friends. We got along with them so well last summer that on gray days we still conjure up memories of our time spent with them to cheer up.

It will be different planning for this trip, since it won't be exclusively a bike trip. Should be interesting.

In the meantime, my mother is working hard to regain her strength, conquer her pain and depression and rejoin regular life. She is working at physical therapy, and having medications almost constantly adjusted, but it seems that she is slowly recovering. At last.