This ongoing series of blog posts is supposed to chronicle the joys of retirement that my wife and I are enjoying.

We are enjoying many of them. We just returned home today after traveling 3,175 miles from Amarillo, to East Texas, to Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. We spent some glorious family time with our sons, our daughter-in-law and her sons, our precious granddaughter, our daughter-in-law’s parents, my cousin and her husband.

My wife and I saw a lot of beautiful country along our sojourn and spent plenty of great “quality time” with our family members.

We had a serious blast, folks.

But …

Our trip had a couple of serious hiccups, which I’ll explain.

On our return home from St. Paul, Minn., we pulled into a truck stop/travel center in Springdale, Ark., where we discovered one of our RV’s wheels was seriously out of alignment. We looked closely and discovered it had burned through some bearings. The wheel was shot.

We summoned a service guy, who told us the axle was damaged. We needed a new one. He brought it the next afternoon — after my wife and I, along with Toby the Puppy, spent a sleepless night in the truck stop parking lot. The noise of semi-trailers coming and going all night — along with the oppressive heat — kept us up all night. We ran our fifth wheel off the battery, which didn’t run our air conditioner.

The service guy replaced the axle the next day and we proceeded onward.

Then came the trip home from Allen, Texas, where we spent a couple of days and nights with granddaughter Emma and her parents.

We journeyed home with our shiny new rear axle holding up just fine. We pulled up to our Amarillo house, got out, then tried to open the slide on our fifth wheel so we could empty our pantry.

The slide doesn’t work. No response to the switch. It’s deader than dead, man.

We’ll get that problem fixed quickly.

So, the upshot of this story? Not every excursion is trouble-free. We have to learn to cope with stumbles and hiccups along the way. I believe we did all right in that regard.

We don’t need more opportunities to present themselves.