Fifty (50) years doesn’t seem like such a long time when you’re looking back on it. But when we were married in 1975, “science fiction” was focused on the years around the turn of the 21st century to the early 2020s. I laugh, because computer technology has come a long, long way in those years. But there are still no flying cars, no tessering (instantaneous travel through higher dimensions, essentially “wrinkling” spacetime to shorten vast distances, like folding paper to bring two points together), or Star Trek-like teleportation.
Between being in the Air Force for 23 years, having some work opportunities, and just being adventurous and resourceful, Randy and I have been travel blessed. We’ve traveled to and lived in a lot of places in this country and world many others never have the opportunity to even see. We did that travel via automobile, airplane, and boat in 1975, and we still do it by automobile, airplane, and ship in 2025.
When we first thought to celebrate our 50th anniversary year every day of that year, we kicked around a lot of ideas how to do that. Deciding on the cruise out of Seattle, and how to combine that with a good long visit to my forever friend, Cindy, who lives in Spokane, WA morphed into the epic road trip idea. We saw it as an exciting, fun opportunity to visit people we’ve met over the years who now live all over the country. We saw it as a mission to revisit places we enjoyed before and see places we never got to explore before. We saw it as a quest to symbolize the odyssey that is a 50+ year marriage. We were all in.
Lynn and Dave (Randy’s sister and her husband, and my best friend) had already committed to going on the cruise with us. But when they heard about the road trip to get to the cruise port in Seattle, they were all in for that, too. What fun we anticipated. What fun we actually had!
Though we’d been to many of the places we planned to visit, there were also many that were new destinations for us. Lynn and I wanted to go to Sedona. The Painted Desert was on the list as was visiting some family in New Mexico we hadn’t seen in 35 years. Lynn and Dave had never been to Las Vegas and though none of us were particularly keen on being in a city like that, Las Vegas is a place you should visit at least once in your lifetime. It was on the way to a myriad of national parks we wanted to see so we put it on the list, too.
I wrote travelogues in this blog about all of the places we went on the Epic 50th Anniversary Grand Adventure Road Trip. Here are links to those stories from August 2025, September 2025, and October 2025. There’re much detail and many photos there if you’re interested.
Toward the tail end of the road trip, the government went into shutdown. We had to skip a few places that were closed as a result. Most affected was our plan to do Phase 3 of the road trip to Washington, DC in early November. That segment was axed for 2025. By the time the government reopened, it was too cold (for us) to travel north to DC. We are rescheduling DC for cherry blossom season (probably the second week in April). Randy and I have never been to our nation’s capital and are really looking forward to that trip, which will be by train from Raleigh, NC, with Kristine (Randy’s little big sister) and her husband, Gary.
On returning from the 8-week adventure, we laid low and took a few weeks to recover. During that time, we contemplated how to celebrate the actual day of our 50th anniversary. A party sounded like too much commotion to me. After a few days of discussion, I booked a very affordable cruise to the Mayan Riviera for the week that included our anniversary date.
Toward the end of October, our friend who helped put in the guest bath walk-in shower earlier in the year had a block of time to help remodel the master bath area. That project involved ripping out the large garden tub we’ve never once used in the four and a half years we’ve lived here. Ripping out the garden tub left exposed concrete floors in the bathroom, so it was also time to get serious about replacing the floors in the entire house.
We arranged for that massive project and scheduled it for January, before Visitor Season began. ColorTile of Port Charlotte called a few weeks later though. They’d had a cancellation and could sandwich the replacement of the floors and baseboards in our entire house between the time we returned from the cruise and Christmas. At least that’s what they thought. We didn’t have any particular plans for Christmas, so we agreed.
The floors were, in fact, done before Christmas. But oh, what a mess. And a hell of a lot of work moving furniture around every day from one place to another. The baseboards were finished before the New Year holidays. The house looks amazing. It seems twice as big as it did before when the space was sliced up and divided by tile, carpet, and vinyl plank.
And that, dear readers, is how 2025 was so incredibly momentous. And so incredibly exhausting.
It would have been cool to just be able to beam over from one place to another on the road trip. A replicator could have remodeled the house without all the physical labor, and the mess construction makes. Rosie the Robot, when she’s a reality (Rumba’s don’t count) will make my life heaven (it’s been a while since I mentioned in this blog how much I hate to clean).
We’re looking forward to another great year. We have a few fun things planned, but none are the extensive adventures we undertook in 2025. We’re going to enjoy just sticking fairly close to home. I should be able to swim the entire season without breast health complications cutting short my enjoyment of the sun, salt, and sand. This year, 2026, is a time for renewing, refreshing, and dreaming a little more about how the future is going to look. Maybe, just maybe, in 10 years we will have teleportation and replication. I, for one, can’t wait.
P.S. On the cruise, for our 50th anniversary, we fell in love with this photography. What better way to commemorate the intertwining of our lives this past half century, than symbolically with photos of the irises of our eyes, those gorgeous windows to our souls, made into an infinity symbol. Isn’t this a beautiful and unique way to mark this milestone?
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