Meet The Travelers - Jim and Carol(click on pic for details)

Jim, aka Dad, aka Grandpa is the patriarch of my family at a young 91.  He is from Burlington, Iowa and spent all of his life there, aside from the time he spent serving our nation while in the United States Army during WWII.  He married Edna Noble, my mom, and was married for 65 years until her passing in 2016.  He has two daughters, Becky, Burlington, Iowa (until just before we leave on vacation when she is moving to Florida to escape winters),  and Kelly, in Bloomington, Illinois. He has two granddaughters,  Beth and Mallory and two grandsons, Matt and Ian.  Jim was a letter carrier for the US Post Office for 35 years until his retirement in 1985. At that time, he worked full time in his own business, The Bicycle Barn, until the Mighty Mississippi flooded the Barn and effectively ended the business. 

Just after Mom passed away, we found out Dad had been keeping an important part of his early life from us. He had been engaged to a woman who was not our mother during his time in New Jersey during the service!  My sister vowed to find her and within days, knowing only her maiden name and town she lived in, actually found her. (My sister can be very...tenacious. :) )  And at this point, I'll apologize to all of the people she hounded during this search to find Carol. Understandably, those she talked to wanted to protect Carol and were hesitant to even talk to her.  She finally broke one down enough to get Carol's number and made the first contact to a very shocked Carol. 

Carol is from Red Bank, New Jersey where she lived with her husband, Al, until they moved to Holiday, Florida in 1980.  Carol worked for the Daily Register newspaper and the library in Redbank and later, in Florida, a bank.   She has one son, Michael, married to Denise, one grandson, Ryan, and one grand daughter, Shannon.  She also has 2 great grandchildren.

Carol and Jim live with Carol's always-entertaining sister Sylvia.  Carol doesn't know a stranger. She volunteers and maintains a wide network of friends and family.  Jim has stories of a lifetime and a great sense of humor. He loves history and current events and reads voraciously.  His love of history is what inspired his granddaughter, Mallory, to major in history in college.  Carol and Jim have a running Scrabble battle going on and have played hundreds of games.  I won't post who's ahead at this point.  :)

Small tidbit, my dad would come home from work with a new word used in a sentence and I'd have to look it up to find the meaning.  That and his love of crossword puzzles made words an important thing in our house.  I always got in the 99th percentile in vocabulary tests in school. Thanks, Dad.  Small tidbit the other way, I learned to play chess in the 5th grade and would play at home with dad.  He kept playing, playing the before-computers Postal Chess and played internationally online when technology caught up. 

Check out this news article from the first trip to meet Carol:
https://www.wglt.org/post/dads-first-airplane-trip-lesson-preparedness-perseverance#stream/0

And then, 5 months later, this happened: