Finally, I am starting to feel better. Only out of the hospital for eight days, during which I didn’t sleep more than a few hours each day with all the noise and interruptions in ICU, and then the 35 hours journey, only four days later, I was exhausted. Last night, I slept through the night and feel much better today.

My Fitbit showed I slept straight through the night for eight hours and nine minutes, and I feel like a new person today. Then, of course, the Afib bout on the plane set me back after the six-hour ordeal. Since we arrived here four days ago, and after unpacking, organizing, grocery shopping, cooking meals, and doing the daily posts, I was wiped out by yesterday afternoon. I fell asleep several times during the day and evening.

Waking up today, I felt like a new person. As soon as I was showered and dressed, I asked Tom if he was up to going for a walk, and he was happy to do so. We were out the door in minutes for easy walking on the smooth pavement to the end of the road and then turning around. It wasn’t very far, but the round trip was a start as we’ll continue to walk each day.

When we returned, we made coffee and sat at the table on the lanai while planning the food for the arrival of friends Karen and Rich, who’ll be here next Friday. We plan to make a few Chinese stir-fry dishes which is an easy meal to make once all the chopping and dicing is done.

We must purchase groceries online in the future, as is the case for many residents. The golf carts don’t hold much, as mentioned, plus it’s a lot easier to have groceries delivered to the house than the time-consuming grocery shopping process.

We’d used Instacart a few days ago, but the shipping and delivery fees were high and didn’t make sense to us. Instead, we found Kroger with a monthly cost of $7.95 instead of over $30 in fees for Instacart plus a required $95 a-year membership. Plus, the first 30 days at Kroger are free.

Result? We’ll pay Kroger a total of $15.90 in delivery fees for the remaining almost two months we’ll be here. This made sense to us. Plus, the prices at Kroger seemed lower than those we paid for Publix grocery delivery when many prices were marked up for delivery purposes.

We’ll plan to socialize and get out for dinner tomorrow and Saturday. Once our friends Karen and Rich leave, we’ll begin contacting the many people who contacted us that would like to meet us. Then, our even more active social life will begin. Surely, we’ll enjoy it.

Also, we’re especially enjoying all the conveniences we’re experiencing now. Not only is this house more well-equipped than any holiday home we’ve rented, but the simple convenience of temperature control during the day and night, throughout the house, the tap water we can drink, the massive inventory of household products available for our use and being able to watch local news are delightful.

In holiday homes throughout the world, we never turn on the TV. But here, it’s fun to flick through channels and see what we’d like to watch while we’re busy working on our laptops. The WiFi is steady, the power stays on, and the weather is perfect. We spend several hours a day on the lanai, enjoying the nesting birds who’ve found a home in the perfectly trimmed bushes and shrubs.

No, there are no animals around. Today is trash pickup day, when all the residents leave their large, sturdy garbage bags at the end of their driveway. When we walked this morning, seeing all the garbage bags in driveways, we couldn’t believe that no animals would get into the bags. But, not a single bag had been ransacked for its contents. How unusual this is to us!

None of these differences encourage us to rethink our plans to visit remote locations and countries with fewer conveniences than we’re experiencing here. We didn’t plan our world travels under the premise that life would be easy. We planned to explore new horizons, which we hope to continue in times to come.

Be well.

Photo from ten years ago today, May 4, 2013: