This Summer we'll be doing our best to make lemonade out of some of the lemons life handed us recently.

Our original travel plans for the year included spending a month camping our way around Florida in February and March, followed by a visit to Redwoods, Crater Lake & Lassen Volcanic National Parks this Summer. But, my wife Petra fell and suffered a nasty spiral fracture of both bones in her lower leg while we were camping in Galveston Island State Park on our way to Florida. Fortunately, the Univ of Texas has a medical school just seven miles from where we were camping. They put her in a full leg cast and we returned to Tucson for her recuperation. After about a month, they cut her cast down so she could bend her knee and for the last six weeks she has been in a special boot. She's been limited to hobbling around on one foot using a rolling walker since the accident and has been going stir crazy since becoming more or less housebound. Hopefully she'll get the green light to ditch the walker and actually start walking on it again next week.

We had put our other travel plans for this summer on hold until we knew more about her mobility, but we got a killer offer for a "last minute" fare for a 14 day R/T cruise from Vancouver to Anchorage & return. So, although I had planned that our next trip to Alaska would be next year driving up the ALCAN Highway in the RV, this was a deal that was too good to pass up. As a result, we'll be driving up to Vancouver and back next month and Petra can her to finish her recuperation in style without overtaxing her leg.

After that, we have some friends from England who will be visiting Las Vegas in September. We plan on joining them there for a couple of days and, as long as we are so close, we'll take the scenic route home and check out the Fall colors at Cedar Breaks National Monument and go apple picking at Capitol Reef NP. If the weather is nice, we'll probably drop by the North Rim of the Canyon on the way home as well.

We'll try Florida again next February.

Jim