~Sunday, May 20, 2022~
Day 644
What a way to start out the day……a waste of a trip for me and poor Hank this morning. I had an 11:00 appointment at the Sedona Walgreens for my second Shingles shot and thought everything was good to go, until the clerk told me it would be $200 since they are not contracted with Kaiser. No shot in my mind is worth $200. So I told them to hold on while I made a phone call to Kaiser’s Member Services Department. I was told that there was no guarantee that I would be reimbursed, and of course being a Sunday, the Claims department was closed. I should have checked all this out ahead of time. I guess I was expecting the same outcome as my COVID test reimbursement. Trying to keep up with routine appointments, including dental for us and Sadie has been a little challenging on the road, and thankfully we’re very healthy. We knew that we were limited on Kaiser locations throughout our travels but have managed to coordinate necessary appointments with our timing on the West and East Coasts. They do have facilities in Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C. as well. Back to my shot. I had made this appointment a while ago, before knowing I’d be visiting the West Coast again in June. So I messaged my doctor to see if June would be in the appropriate window of having the second shot, and it looks like I’ll just make it. So there you have it!! June it is.
What a welcome surprise when our neighbor Kristen and her young daughter came over for a special delivery of homemade sourdough bread.
Evidently, she’s quite the cook/baker, so of course it was absolutely delicious and a nice accompaniment to my salmon/avocado toast. Thank you Kristen!
All along, we had it in our minds that we were leaving Monday though our calendar showed otherwise (obviously we hadn’t looked at the calendar in a while). I guess you become complacent when in one place this long. It’s actually amazing that we haven’t made an arrival or departure mistake yet (knock on wood!) So we talked about this. We’ve noticed other travelers (one’s we follow on Instagram) have made mistakes in arriving either too early or too late to a site by looking at the wrong week on their phone calendars. I can see how easy it would be to make this error on a small device like that. We have chosen to use the old fashioned book calendar method.
It seems bullet proof: It highlights the exact days we’re at any location and the writing is much bigger making it easier to read. We even include how much we’re spending each day on lodging. It’s been a vital tool for our trip for sure. Unless we lost it. So maybe the phone calendar would be a good back up?
Man, Arizona weather is so all over the place. With the weather pretty crummy which put a kibosh on our Cornhole game plans, Jeff and I worked on the final phase of our Alaska trip. We did it!! 👏👏. Weeks of planning our 100 days of summer in Alaska is done!
The itinerary is complete (at least for now) and the reservations are booked until we cross the border into Washington on September 29th, 2022. What a relief. We could have winged the entire thing, but it’s just not in our nature not to have some sort of framework. We had to at least start with something, with the expectation that things will change.
At the end of the day in celebration, God decided to give us a full rainbow. 🌈
