Our Support Team
January-May 2006
After a Christmas break, we headed back out on the road, going south and east to Arizona where, in quick succession we had lunch with three members of Ray's high school class ... Joan, pictured here with her husband, Rich ...
... Leslie and her husband, Ron ...
... and Pat, who lives in a desert Shangri-La.
We also were able to drop in and spend a hour with Ray's high school math teacher, Ken, and his wife, Claire.
Arriving in Florida we spent an afternoon with Ray's other stepmother, Drena, her daughter, Lynn, and friend, Ken.
Ray's college roommate, Ted and wife, Cheryl, were next on the agenda. They showed us what life is like on the Florida coast.
Candi, another one of Ray's high school classmates, gave us a grand tour of her part of central Florida, and her yacht club.
Later, we had dinner with her parents.
We met up again with our camera shy friends from Wisconsin, Tom and Jennifer, at their condo where we spent two days enjoying the sun.
Steve and Ray met on the floor of an early Macintosh trade show in 1986. Soon after that Heizer Software took off with Steve's tax software being a key part of the product line. Several years later Steve went off on his own with his brother to found an even more successful tax software firm that made the Inc. 500 list several years in a row. It was great to see him again along with ...
... his wife, Lois, who we had also come to know over the years of our business association.
Jay and Ray were close friends during their high school and college years, and even hitchhiked the full length of Highway 66 together the summer of 1963. But they had not been in touch for about 20 years. We got back in touch with Jay and his wife, Dell, and, sure enough, the years just melted away.
Heading north and west from Florida as Spring approached, we spent the night in Brenda and Jim's driveway in Tennessee. Brenda and Ray had known each other through CAS for a decade, but had never met in person ... a situation now remedied.
In Missouri we stopped in to see our son's mother-in-law, Linda, and get a tour of her town and ...
... to see her son, Brendan, a chef by profession, who, together with his mom, made us a great dinner!
Moving on to Colorado, high school pal, Jim and his wife, Kay, put us up for two nights, taught us a thing or two about Denver omletes ...
... and gave us a grand tour of Rocky Mountain National Park.
Our "support team" was not only made up of folks we visited along the way. There were also several "home base" members. Margaret sold us her Suburban, helped us get it ready for the road, and remained in touch as we took it all over the place, always excited to learn where her old buggy had gone to next.
Chris, Heizer Software's first employee years ago, set up a contact network that could be activated if we didn't check in regularly or other issues arose. We used it twice with our cell phones ... once to report a license plate when an odd man joined us in our campsite in a nearly empty park in Michigan, and later when we became concerned about a man wandering around with a rifle in a remote National Forest campground in Idaho ... It turned out he was just bear hunting ... which only replaced one concern with another!
And finally there was Ingrid, who for the full year received our mail, faxed us what was necessary, and attended to many other details that made our journey nearly glitch-free. Without her efficient backup, it would have been a very different trip.
