Seniors who have hung up the keys, do you have any regrets?

[garyb1st]

anyone who thinks that their driving skills are as good as ever at 80+ either was never a very good driver, or they are just in denial.

Even someone with exceptional driving skills can be a crappy driver. There's an element to driving that doesn't get much press. It's about the comfort level of the driver. IMHO, some people shouldn't be allowed to get behind the wheel of an automobile. Their level of discomfort is almost palpable.

Beyond driving skills, deteriorating health is an issue for many seniors. But anyone who has been around for a few years knows that aging doesn't affect us all the same way. Some are quite youthful in their 80's and 90's. Others probably shouldn't be driving after age 65. Unfortunately driving tests don't measure some of the more important aspects of good driving.

At 81, I'm a bit more cautious and certainly a lot more aware of what can go wrong while driving a large vehicle. That said, I'm still very comfortable driving the Pace.

 

[Onyrlef]

From my limited motorhome driving experience:

Our Ford F53 Chassis (think you have Workhorse) has a lot of steering play even with modifications. Each time I drive it I wear myself out! I do recognize frequency of driving means I am not developing driving skills.

The seat travel is insufficient for me to reach the pedals without a pillow type back support moving me to the front seat edge. I have sunk to 5'3'.

I test drove a Newmar Vantana 35' diesel motorhome. WOW. All the above problems with the F53 vanish. The learning curve would take some miles but I do not feel I would be exhausted as I built driving memory.

I suggest Maria take a diesel test drive. You likely would benefit too.

Dan likes to drive and I like to read. So as long as we have the current motorhome, my driving skills will be poor and forget parking and jugging distance and the rest of the more complicated non-liner skills.

Some of the driver seats can be moved forward by either unbolting and moving to another bolt hole or loosing the bolts and sliding it forward. I moved ours forward from the Lebron James position the factory had it at.

 

[Kirk]

At 81, I'm a bit more cautious and certainly a lot more aware of what can go wrong while driving a large vehicle. That said, I'm still very comfortable driving the Pace.

It is very difficult to evaluate yourself. I chose to stop driving an RV not because I couldn't do it or that I was uncomfortable doing it, but because the risk is greater and my wife's issues made it difficult for her to enjoy. I hope that you realize that your reflexes are not what they once were as well. Your feeling comfortable is not the complete answer so I hope that you are as good as you believe that you are. I have no opinion on that. I would remind you that I was only trying to answer the question that you asked and I tried to give you an honest answer and was not telling you what to do.

 

[Laura & Charles]

Charles, I'd love a tag axle diesel but we're not big on RV parks and so-called RV resorts. Do you boon-dock with your 43 footer?

Frankly, we’ve boondocked only twice; once for four days and another for five. We’ve overnighted a ton of times without hookups while underway, but I don’t reall call that boondocking. But that’s because we’ve both worked full time and full hookup sites for a period of ~a month was our M.O. We’ve fairly recently retired and are soon to be more of the grid. I’m in the process of switching over to lithium and getting ready for a launch date in May. I may well find that Rosie’s size is more of a problem than I’m anticipating… y’all will certainly hear about either way.

 

[UTTransplant]

Gary, why doesn’t Maria take an RV driving class with a professional instructor? Husbands are not known for being the best at teaching. RVDrivingSchool.com has instructors all over the county. Highly recommend. BTW, don’t go with her on the lesson. Let her learn on her own.

 

[John From Detroit]

I will say finding things to do after you "Hang up the keys" is important.

I now volunteer with two different ordinations that as an RVer I could not do.

Well actually 3 if I count the Political one that is keeping me fairly busy with meetings and such.

 

[garyb1st]

Gary, why doesn’t Maria take an RV driving class with a professional instructor? Husbands are not known for being the best at teaching. RVDrivingSchool.com has instructors all over the county. Highly recommend.

Pam, you'll have to ask Maria. We've talked about it numerous times but it seems like there's always some reason that has kept her from doing it.

BTW, don’t go with her on the lesson. Let her learn on her own.

Agree, I wouldn't want me around either if I was learning to drive.

 

[garyb1st]

I would remind you that I was only trying to answer the question that you asked and I tried to give you an honest answer and was not telling you what to do.

Understand Kirk. I've always valued your input. To be honest, there was a time, long before I turned 80, when I cringed at the thought of 80 year old seniors driving down the highway. But over the years I've changed my thinking. Now it's those seniors in their 90's that give me pause.

 

[Adventurous Traveler]

Even someone with exceptional driving skills can be a crappy driver. There's an element to driving that doesn't get much press

This is very true. IMHO driving comes down to the simple question to the driver "Do you enjoy driving, or is its purpose utilitarian only?" In my experience, people who enjoy driving understand some of the geometry needed in driving. This is magnified when driving any kind of RV when judging angles and radii. People who enjoy the drive have a good "mind's eye" in operating their vehicle, car, truck, or RV. My DW has almost no problems driving our DP except at times cutting right-hand turns in campground a bit short.

Some posts have talked about moving on from being on the road with their RV to park models sitting at desirable locations. My BIL (wife's bro) has a beautiful set-up on a private lake campground 50 miles from our home. He's getting up in his years and he has gently suggested we move on from RV travel and buy his lakefront park model. As nice as his setup is that isn't the lifestyle us. Stationary, close neighbors, everybody knows everybody, and you can't pick up and move on if you don't like your neighbors.

No, we'll try to hang on to some kind of RV'ing (as I posted) as long as we have the physical and mental abilities to do so.

 

[NY_Dutch]

Understand Kirk. I've always valued your input. To be honest, there was a time, long before I turned 80, when I cringed at the thought of 80 year old seniors driving down the highway. But over the years I've changed my thinking. Now it's those seniors in their 90's that give me pause.

I'll be 82 next month. My physical therapist has a driving simulator in her office that runs through a series of driving situations to test both reaction times and situational awareness. After my second stroke in 2023, I tested in the 60-70 year old range. Last month, after many physical and occupational therapy sessions, I tested in 40-50 range.

 

[jackiemac]

I'll be 82 next month. My physical therapist has a driving simulator in her office that runs through a series of driving situations to test both reaction times and situational awareness. After my second stroke in 2023, I tested in the 60-70 year old range. Last month, after many physical and occupational therapy sessions, I tested in 40-50 range.

Wow. That's really great. You've obviously made some good progress!!

 

[NY_Dutch]

Wow. That's really great. You've obviously made some good progress!!

I credit it all to two wonderful therapists! Since my two strokes, they've gotten me from a wheel chair to a walker to a quad cane, and last December to an ordinary straight cane. I couldn't be happier! My speech therapist also gets a lot of credit, but she didn't help with my reflexes of course.

 

[Larry N.]

I'll be 82 next month. My physical therapist has a driving simulator in her office that runs through a series of driving situations to test both reaction times and situational awareness. After my second stroke in 2023, I tested in the 60-70 year old range. Last month, after many physical and occupational therapy sessions, I tested in 40-50 range.

Good job! And it shows what I've always thought that, barring severe physical problems the mental sharpness and attitude is as important, often more important, than age or general physical condition. So many (far from all) octogenarians are better overall drivers than quite a number of folks at much younger ages. And attitude, the gotta hurry syndrome that causes many to ride your rear bumper and/or to pass at every slim chance, etc. certainly makes a giant difference.

 

[garyb1st]

Larry hit the nail on the head. Mental sharpness and attitude is important. I'll add awareness of surroundings. Then there's one that comes with experience. One example I learned early on is my F250 and small trailer wouldn't stop on a dime. There's an element of math and physics involved in driving. Neither requires more than a rudimentary understanding. Unfortunately some don't understand or simply ignore those elements.

 

[Onyrlef]

Larry hit the nail on the head. Mental sharpness and attitude is important. I'll add awareness of surroundings. Then there's one that comes with experience. One example I learned early on is my F250 and small trailer wouldn't stop on a dime. There's an element of math and physics involved in driving. Neither requires more than a rudimentary understanding. Unfortunately some don't understand or simply ignore those elements.

GH Hardy in "A Mathematician's Apology" claims the overwhelming majority of breakthroughs in any discipline occur in the first half of a persons life and the majority of those in the first quarter to a third. Newton, Einstein, Ramanujan ( died at 33), Euler, Gauss, Littlewood, Russell...... A persons mental acuity declines along with physical ability.

 

[Oldgator73]

.. A persons mental acuity declines along with physical ability.

So how do you explain somebody like Stephen Hawking?

 

[Lou Schneider]

I've been planning a 2500 mile road trip, from my sister's house near Oakhurst CA (Bass Lake), to Pahrump for my annual checkup, then down to Tucson and Yuma before returning here. About a month ago I flew to Portland, OR, bought a new Mitsubishi Mirage sub-compact and drove it back to CA. It's fun to drive and cruises nicely at 75-80 MPH. I enjoy driving it more than driving my pickup truck, with or without the 5th wheel behind it.

I did some figuring and the cost of taking the car on this trip at 40 MPG vs taking the truck and trailer at 9 MPG works out to almost a wash. Less fuel cost vs. about twice as much for the 14 nights of lodging vs campgrounds. Not to mention cutting the actual driving hours by about a third by driving the speed limit vs. the slower progress in the RV.

So I'm going to try the road trip in the car starting next week.

 

[Kirk]

But over the years I've changed my thinking. Now it's those seniors in their 90's that give me pause.

I think that is part of the difficulty in our judging ourselves. And as much as a simulator may help to figure that out, I would never consider that to be the final word. Since we have been living in a senior citizens community, I have become very aware of the difference in capabilities of people over the range of ages. When my parents turned 70 it thought that it was near the time and began to watch them more closely. It seems that between the time that I turned 50 and 70, the age that is old moved up as well! My parents gave me a good object lesson in driving abilities. Dad, who was 8 years older than my mother, had a minor accident while looking for an address when he was 81 and after a lot of thought he chose to stop driving and sold his truck. Mother was not that way. When she was 85 (dad had passed way by then), she suffered from elder dementia and unknown to us was sometimes needing help to find her way home from the grocery store she had been shopping in for more than 40 years. The only graceful way I could get her to stop driving was to get her to loan her car to my sister. Even after she was in long term care she clung to her driving license, unaware that it had expired. Their examples made me very aware of the age factor of driving. I know from experience that it takes more concentration on driving than it used to. I really believe that I could still drive our senior bus or an RV safely, but I simply chose not to wait for an accident to tell me different. Each of us must make that choice and I'll not tell anyone that its that time when I have never seen them drive, but we should all be very aware of what waiting too long before we stop driving could mean to us and possibly others that we share the roads with. Just be careful out there!

 

[Onyrlef]

So how do you explain somebody like Stephen Hawking?

What's to explain, Hawking like most every other great thinker did his breakthrough work in his 20's, 30's and 40's, his mostly with Roger Pemrose ( Singularity Theorem and ..2nd Law of Black Hole Dynamics). He like Einstein wasn't infallible, he argued the Higgs-Boson particle didn't exist and would never be proven and admitted the worst mistake of his life was his position on information retention in black holes, he was wrong on both accounts.. Hardy never implied you become stupid after middle age, only the revolutionary breakthrough ideas ordinarily happen early on in life, especially in mathematics.

 

[Kirk]

Stephen W Hawking, one of the most famous physicists, died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76 years.