Mt. Adams, Washington

[pdedse]

Thanks...seems I have to ride farther and farther to get to new-to-me areas, but WA and OR never seem to disappoint.

Every time I do a ride, I try to appreciate the beauty of the Northwest to the full as my wife and I are edging closer to retirement days, which for us, may involve a relocation. We moved to OR 25 years ago from Arizona and we always thought we'd go back one day. Well, "one day" is now around December 2025, and my wife really wants to return to AZ (north of Tucson) to get away from the OR winters which neither of us like. But the OR summers are sublime, and the riding here is crazy good...the OR coast, the forests, the small farm countrysides, the mountains, the eastern deserts, the rivers, all so scenic and traffic is easily avoided.

And our plan still involves splitting time between the U.S. and Costa Rica where she is from. We don't know whether that will be a 6/6 month split, or 2-3 here and 9-10 there or viseversa. So we can work it out to avoid OR winters and we can avoid AZ summers. She's in love with the idea of retirement communities that offer lots of protection because we'd be gone for months on end. We go back and forth on all the possibilities...our son lives in Portland, our daughter in San Diego and those logistics figure into the equation. Interesting considerations.

But all that is heavily on the mind each time I go riding...are my NW outings coming to an end? There is lots of interesting riding in AZ and in CR...but lots of change coming our way.