Well the Harleys are all gone and so is the noise of their engines but not before one last ride to the Gold Nugget on Sunday morning to watch the parade depart. Amazingly it was easy to drive into town as most bikes were on their way out and back to the their work week, this in retrospect to Saturday the day before when there was a 1 hour traffic wait just to drive into town. I talked Carol into taking the ride with me and have breakfast; decidingly posing for a shot on you guessed it a Harley (pic above) and then settling in for one of her favorite pass times. As you can also see my bike was not happy sharing parking space with them.
It seems that as soon as April was over and May hit, the temperatures jumped 10 degrees causing me to close my windows and turn on the air conditioner, the dogs (tiffa & Corky) baking in the pic above seem to love it. The desert is a special place, where although hot in summer time is also dry which makes the heat very tolerable since your sweat evaporates and allows your body to cool much better then in tropical locations where humidity prevents evaporation and more people die of heat stroke. So the high desert is still a well kept secret from most but I think baby boomers are catching on more and more as the arthritis sets in which the dry desert seems to magically heal. Just ask anyone over the age of 70 out here and they will all tell you the same thing, "I love the hot summer on my bones". As for me at age 49 this April I am still contemplating my second wind since according to baby boomer news, age 50 is now the new age 30 so every day my workouts get a little better, one hour in the morning with the incredible Denise Austin and then 6 miles on the mountain bike every afternoon. Yup, I am once again beginning to feel the eye of the tiger and soon I will be back to age 30 and my retirement will be over. I love telling everyone else in this retirement community I an 63 as they are astonished at my looks and health (just kidding).
Occasionally I still hear some late baby boomers talk about how great it is not to have had kids and I suppose if you know you are going to make an unwilling parent or not break the chain of dysfunction with your own past up bringing, ruining a perfectly good child is not the wat to go, better to be barren and deprived. But as for me as I look back and contemplate all my accomplishments and world wide experiences in the Navy and CoastGuard nothing was and is more rewarding then raising your own child and having that connected relationship experience. In addition you cannot experience the fullness and deep meaning of all the other fun things in life unless you have experienced the connected bond of a functional child-parent relationship. When I look back at all the fun and still see fun ahead I know it was without question the anchor point to my life and to a higher level self awareness and self fulfillment as a human being. A few pics of my kids above when they were small.
