| Corporate life has plenty of advantages, and for Silvia that included events like the time the company arranged to take over Universal Studios: “We had the place to ourselves, no lines, just walk onto any of the rides.” And when I asked Silvia my favorite question, the one about the best advice she’d ever gotten, she smiled and said, “We got to meet Warren Buffet — he invested in Pilot – and he told us, ‘Keep it simple, stupid. Stay with what you’re good at and don’t complicate things.’ That advice keeps coming back to me.”
The big advantage of a career with a major corporation is, of course, financial, including retirement savings. Although Silvia hadn’t reached retirement age – and still hasn’t — the stresses around the Covid pandemic sapped her enthusiasm for the work. She recalled the decision: “I didn’t plan on retiring, but Covid broke me. We kept the stores running, but truckers didn’t take to the rules for dealing with Covid — I got insulted and even spit at. It broke me.”
Her daughters were grown, she had long been divorced from the husband she married out of high school, and by the time of Covid her partner/wife, Brenda, was urging her to retire. She finally said, ‘Let’s sell everything and let’s go.”
So they bought a fifth-wheel and hit the road. Their first trip was eight weeks to the East Coast, hoping to find a spot to spend winters. But, as Silvia soon discovered, “I’m not a wet-heat kind of girl.” So they turned their attention to warm weather locations in the West, and that eventually took them to Arizona and to Silveridge. They still spend summers in Colorado, where they have five acres near Grand Junction for parking the fifth-wheel, and where Silvia’s favorite activity is taking her five grandsons on week-long camping trips.
Photos: One of those Western trips took Silvia and Brenda to Seattle and to a visit with the “Freemont Troll,” public art that lives under the Aurora Bridge; and that’s Silvia and Brenda with two of Silvia’s five grandsons |
