That’s me, Maureen O’Shea and 78mph.com is my site.

On June 15th, I’ll be leaving Calgary to go on a road trip with my friend, Ruth. I like taking pictures, and I like to write, so my oldest daughter, Colleen, suggested that I set up a blog.

My name is Maureen O’Shea, and I’m 80. The picture you see of me on the left was taken at the Predator Ridge Golf Course last summer. I love to golf and PR’s “The Ridge” course is one of my favourites.

Setting up the blog wasn’t exactly easy. I tried to set it up on my own at WordPress, which is what Colleen initially recommended, but I got lost, and quickly got my daughter on the phone. She looked at it for a while and said, “If you really want to have a blog, you need to have a name of your own. I use GoDaddy all the time, and I’ll call them. But first, you need a name.”

So we started talking about what we needed the name to convey. Ruth is a bit younger than I am so I wanted something in the middle, and we looked at different ideas and, finally, I said “78 mpg” but Colleen said, “No! 78 mph! That would be way-cool!”

She checked to see if it was available, and it was.

78 mph was available!

And that’s Ruth, driving!

“Can you set it up for me,” I asked? I really didn’t know what that meant, if the truth be told, but I knew Colleen did.

“No,” she answered. “But I know now exactly what you need, so I’ll call GoDaddy and have them call you back.”

She called them and, even though the nice man at the other end of the phone said they didn’t usually do things this way, Colleen convinced them to call me back to get my domain set up and a managed WordPress site, which is one of the services they offer. Within minutes. I had a bunch of photos uploaded into my theme, and had found my way to post my first blog. And this is it.

Colleen tells me I should try to write 500 words with every post that I do, and to think about whether my post will fit into any of the categories she’s set up for me. Those categories are Games – the card games and puzzles we love, Driving (the idea behind the blog was initially about the road trip we’re going on this summer), Fashion, Food, Golf and Road Trip. So I have a lot of interests, and a lot to say about each of them, and with the help of the CyberChimps template (Go Daddy Bold Stripe) I hope you’re going to find it as interesting and fun reading it as I’m (hopefully) going to have writing it!

I don’t know if you’ve seen any of that show on Netflix called “Orange is the New Black” but I can tell you that 80 is the new 65. If you’ve taken good care of yourself like Ruth and I have, you’re lucky — and you can’t just sit back and wait for something bad to happen. You need to get out, try new things, meet new people and keep on living. 78 mph is exactly that, from our perspective.

Enjoy!