You’re probably familiar with the concept of medical tourism. It’s a thriving industry driven by people who travel internationally to find more affordable healthcare outside of their home country.
But many of us full-timers do the reverse. We travel back home to visit our regular docs. All three of us—yes this includes the aging dog—have health issues that need ongoing attention. So we haul our ridiculous three-ring circus back “home” to Carson City. That lets us maintain continuity of care for our various ailments.
This go-round, we’re finishing up a three-week stint in the area. After four warmish months in Arizona, it was a shock to the system to return to a place we love that was still not quite done with winter. Fortunately, spring arrived in truth in our time home and we snuck in a little bit of fun—motorcycling and kayaking—in between our numerous commitments.
We hoped to manage it all in two weeks. Clearly that didn’t happen. Coordinating the scheduling in a fixed time frame is challenging to begin with. Throw in a pandemic just for fun and it gets even more complicated.
It’s time to be back on the road, though. We didn’t get in everything that we needed to but we’ll figure that out later. The point of full-timing isn’t to anchor back at home for weeks on end trying to manage appointments.
We’re hopeful that as the pandemic continues to ease, we’ll be comfortable with air travel again. That way we can manage blips back home to handle these kinds of things in smaller batches. Without hauling the eight tons of our nomadic lives with us each time. That will certainly make our reverse medical tourism a whole lot less cumbersome. And the ability to tend to everything and not sacrifice our healthcare needs for the full-time life would be pretty cool, too.
I finally found time to get caught up on your blog. You guys have been dealing with a lot. Full timing is not for wimps!
I have been taking a break from FB (possibly permanent). If so, I’ll have to dust off onlydirtroads.com, which hasn’t been touched in 3 years or so.
I think you have seen our new-ish trailer…we sold the Nest (which didn’t take a day) and bought the Mission sight-unseen. We camped twice in it (once on the way home) but it spent winter along the house. Too many things got in the way of a winter trip (COVID notwithstanding). Then we did one weekend trip a month ago, on the way home, an axle nut spun off a trailer wheel, followed, almost, by the wheel. It took a month of screwing around to repair everything associated with that disaster. We just returned from our shakedown cruise and are about ready to go places. If there are places to go in the post-Covid camping insanity. We miss you guys! Hope we can connect somewhere sometime.
Wow, Lou! That sounds like quite an ordeal. The campground situation is not great. We’ve had success in finding really nice boondocking sites but even some of those are surprisingly crowded.
We definitely need to get together. We always had Overland Expo to count on in the past. I suppose we’ll have to find another way to do our reunions! And I’m all in favor of reviving Only Dirt Roads. I’d love to see that!