Working Our Way Home

New Mexico

Spring in Albuquerque

Wind power...we saw tons of windmills across the country!

Tuesday, March 24

We are working our way across Interstate 40. And I mean WORKING. Poor John has been fighting steady 20 to 30 mile an hour cross winds with a 40 mile an hour blast about every three miles since yesterday around noon. Our trip out of L.A. went well and the drive across from Flagstaff through New Mexico was gorgeous and uneventful. We started out yesterday in Tucumcari, New Mexico after spending the night listening to the wind howl and shake Mary every five minutes. It wasn't a terribly restful night. When we hit the highway yesterday we had a strong tail wind making our morning drive a pleasant one and as an added bonus it upped our mileage by about a half mile per gallon. That gain was wiped out as fast as our retirement fund was when the stock market tanked. He battled to keep Mary on the road into Oklahoma City where we fueled up at Flying J. I haven't been to the grocery store since before we left Scottsdale mostly because I stocked up on a lot of things and while we were in Los Angeles we ate out every night but one. When we stop at KOA's we normally aren't close to a grocery store so by yesterday we had been out of sweet stuff for two days. EEEKKKK! So when we stopped at Flying J I made a run on the convenience store coming back with a bag full of peanut M&M's, wintergreen Live Savers and a small container of vanilla ice cream. The girl at the checkout had a funny smile on her face when I paid for our loot. Binge eater, sugar-holic or pot smoker...I'm not sure what she was thinking but I was happy Kamper (the KOA spelling of the word) as I leaned into the wind on my way back to Mary. I so love the wind. NOT.

We resumed our battle across Oklahoma in the sticky wind. Oklahoma has earned the top spot on my least favorite states list due to the fact that every time we have been through there the wind has been blowing at hurricane speeds, or it has been pouring down rain, or it has been so hot and sticky that you couldn't breathe. It is a pretty state but the weather really sucks.

At one point I touched John's shoulders and they felt like granite. Catching 45,000 pounds of motor coach once a minute was taking its toll. Our original plan was to make two very long days of driving and get home tonight. Ha! By the time we had gone 10 miles outside of Oklahoma City John said, "Please get on the internet and find us a spot to stop as soon as possible. I've had all of this that I want for one day." Well we ended up on Checotah, Oklahoma a fair amount of miles from Oklahoma City. At one point traffic stopped and John started fiddling with the CB radio to figure out what was happening. All he got was static (either it hasn't worked well since we got it or we haven't worked it well since we got it). He hung it up in disgust and said, "Probably a motor coach blown over on it's side." I kept quiet. We sat there for ten minutes giving him a bit of a rest and then traffic moved again. It turned out to be a pickup with a broken axle in the left lane. As we neared Checotah I looked up and saw something in the road. We were on concrete highway and out of traffic so I had a little time to see it before we rolled over it. It looked like a really long (like 3 feet long) strip of something, like trash, that stuck to the road and was being whipped around by the wind. As we passed over it John said, "That was a snake that someone ran over and was flopping around." He was tired and I was too so I resisted telling him that I was fine with my own interpretation of what I saw. Gross.

So we pulled off the road and eased into the Checotah KOA. It was a cool little country KOA and the people who ran it were very creative. Had the wind not been blowing at F-5 speeds I would have gotten some photos of some of the cute things that they did. Breezy and Ransom had been so patient all day but their little motors were wound tight so we tightened up our hats and took the mile long nature walk to the lake and back. At one point Ransom, who I have to keep on the leash because he is a total wild man if I turn him loose and it takes forever to catch him, cut loose with Breezy who was off the leash and they ran full tilt, chasing in a 16 foot circle around me until I was dizzy. They have been their usual wonderful selves during this entire trip. It is challenging for them sometimes because we don't always have the best place to exercise them. They ran and Breezy would pounce on Ransom, they would roll together and Ransom would pop up and run flat out challenging Breezy to catch him. He is faster than she is so it would take a few trips around before she would jig and he would jog and they would roll together in a furry ball and then Ransom would pop up and take off again. We both laughed until we cried. Finally worn down a bit we blew back to the coach for a light dinner and some ice cream!

Wednesday, March 25

I got distracted. Sorry. We are in Kentucky at the moment on the Bluegrass Parkway nearly home! As it turned out our day yesterday was spent being beat around on the highway by the same winds that we had on Monday. We managed to slide between two weather fronts first thing yesterday morning so we avoided rain. Come to think of it with the exception of today we avoided rain for the entire three plus weeks that we were on the road. Today we are testing the new neo-dome over the shower that John and Tim installed while we were in Scottsdale. John spent half of one day on the phone tracking one down. He finally got to the manufacturer of the dome. The nice man Dave said that the factory didn't sell to individuals and gave John some numbers to try. None of them worked. He called back and told Dave that none of them worked. He said, "Dave, please sell me a neo-dome." Dave said okay and shipped one by FedEx overnight. John and Tim got on the roof and spent some sweaty time in the sun securing the dome and we said some prayers for dry weather until the caulk was able to set up. They were answered and Mary is as good as new again! She has been a trooper through some terrible Interstate highways .The only casualties for her are a missing hubcap and another trip to the shop for wheel balancing. Interstate 10 and Interstate 40 and all of the Interstate systems in California are desperate for help so hopefully some of the stimulus money will find its way to our decaying Interstate system. We encountered a ton of truck traffic which seemed to both of us to be a good sign that the economy might be struggling back to life.

We spent our last night on the road in another KOA an hour south of Nashville. It was a little one in the trees by I-65. We had dinner and got to bed early so we could get up and get on the road home. John turned on the air conditioning in the front of Mary to keep us cool but mostly to drown out the truck noise on the Interstate. Today the wind is down and it is raining but we are so happy to be back in Kentucky that we don't care!

I put together a business blog for John that will have lots of photos of our horses once we get home and settled. I'll keep a calendar updated on our travels on it as well. The address is http://www.saddlebredsales.wordpress.com/ if you want to check it out. This blog thing is pretty cool!

Ransom looking in on his winter vacation

That's it for this trip. I think we may head down to the J.D. Massey show next month and John is judging River Ridge so we will be taking the dogs and heading for Columbus at the end of the month.

Ozona to L.A.

Sunrise in Ozona, Texas

So Ozona was okay. "Okay" is high praise against the vision that my mind had created for a spot for Mary to spend the night. After the skylight debacle in Tampa we had a broken neo-dome but a sparkling clean coach. I had visions of dust storms embedding grit in every nook and cranny of Mary's surface. The RV park in Ozona was positively utilitarian and a little like spending the night on the moon. Rows and rows of hookups on a flat piece of graveled ground with a grassy spot in the middle for the dogs to do their business on. It was a little noisy due to a small truck stop a quarter mile from the entrance to the RV Park. We had been very healthy, eating light and doing all of the right things until we got to Ozona where we fell off the wagon and went to the Tex-Mex truck stop restaurant and chowing down on a salt laden, fat globbed meal, topped off with sugary lemonade. Yum. We went back to eating healthy the next day after dragging our shell socked-systems out of bed before sunrise and getting back on the road. All in all Ozona wasn't the worst place we ever stayed. Remember Wildwood? Better than that.

John and the kids on the moonscape in Ozona

Next stop was Las Cruces, New Mexico at our all time favorite KOA. We spent the day crossing West Texas as Mary hummed down the road. It was a little windy but not nearly as bad as last year and diesel is at an all time low since we started traveling with Mary. Late in the afternoon we pulled into the little campground which is hosted by the nicest people and parked overlooking a valley that twinkles with lights at night. The backdrop is the Caballo Mountains and when the sun goes down they turn to a burnished brick color. It's really beautiful. After we set up we took the dogs for a walk and then I started dinner while John took a well deserved nap. As I was cooking a big new coach pulled in next to us. I watched the sides expand and the gentleman who was driving got out and sorted out the hookups. I was watching a movie and cooking away when I looked out Mary's front window and saw the couple standing outside of the coach, each with a beer in their hands, gazing glassy-eyed at their coach. I recognized the look immediately...new coach owners. If there were bubbles over their heads revealing their thoughts this is what they would have said. The woman: "Holy shit...we really did buy this resort on wheels." The man: "Holy shit. I need another beer." I told John about it when he woke up and we laughed remembering the first night that we had Mary.

We were in Wakarusa, Indiana very close to the northernmost border and not far from Chicago. We drove the Camry up so that one of the local shops could install the transmission pump and towing apparatus to the front end. We spent part of two days in the shop taking a crash course (no pun intended) in how to operate Mary's systems and then we both drove her in a school parking lot. It was January and it was ice cold and spitting snow. I remember having nightmares about our first trip in Mary being in a snow storm or worse, on ice. The nice people at Monaco assured us that we would be fine so off we went to the transmission place to pick up the Camry. After that we spent the night at the hotel we had been staying in being as Mary was winterized (her water systems were full of anti-freeze). I got up in the night and looked out the window in both awe and horror (the look I saw on the faces of our new coach owner neighbors in Las Cruces) at Mary, under the lights of the parking lot. She looked like an office building on wheels. But she was beautiful. Very early the next morning we got up and found a light blanket of snow on the ground. We put our things in Mary and John fired her up. The first thing that we had to do was to get on a turnpike which required that we drive over an overpass. When you first ride in a big coach it is a little hard to assess where your sides and wheels are in relation to the side of the road and the center line. I spent a good deal of my ride to Lexington with my butt puckered thinking that we were driving on the shoulder of the road or in our neighbor's lane. Try that going over an overpass! The next thing that happened was a discussion regarding the directions that Tom Tom (remember our GPS headaches?) were giving us about how to head south. We listened to Tom Tom and John ended up driving Mary through downtown South Bend...another seriously butt puckering experience. The last mistake was a trip through downtown Versailles which is a tiny town near Prospect Lane, the farm where Mary resides when we are in Kentucky. That little jaunt made the trip through South Bend look like a drive down a super highway. A few days later we were at a dinner party with some horse people when a friend of ours told us a story. He said he was driving through downtown Versailles the other day when he looked up and saw this huge coach working its way down through the narrow streets. He said he thought some rock star must have made a wrong turn. Then he got close and said, "Wait a minute. I KNOW that woman! And that's Johnny driving that big bus!"

When I think about how much we didn't know about this coach when we took off for Florida the first time I shudder. Now we are pretty comfortable with all of the systems and John drives her like he's been doing it all his life.

Breezy lounging in Scottsdale

So we left Las Cruces and drove to Scottsdale on Monday. We met Tim and Ryan Arcuri there in the afternoon and took off to our favorite haunt, Earl's Restaurant for a light dinner. The week in Scottsdale was great. The weather was fabulous, in the mid to upper 70's all week and we had a very relaxing week with our friends. They had a great horse show and on the following Monday morning we left to head farther west to Los Angeles. But first we decided to make a stop in Palm Desert for a couple of days of rest.

The red boulders heading into Tucson

There is an Outdoor Resorts in Palm Desert. That is the same name as the RV park that we stayed at in Newport, Oregon that was so beautiful...we thought. In Newport we overlooked the ocean and the spaces were huge and private and it was just plain heaven. So we made a reservation for two nights and happily headed down the road. When we arrived at Outdoor Resorts Road (pretty impressive to have a road named after your business) we made the left by the incredible landscaped entrance and pulled into the park. John registered us and we passed through the gates into the park. We had a map of the park and my eyes bugged when I saw all of the spaces. It was landscaped impecably and there was a golf course that ran through the property...twenty seven holes! We drove in and I promptly blew a fuse and got us lost. The roads through the place were narrow and it felt like we were going the wrong way on a one way street for the entire ten minutes that we drove looking for our space. After winding all over the park we finally found space number 850. Yes, eight hundred and fifty. There are actually 1,213 spaces in the park and it is nearly full, mostly with fifth wheel trailers, golf carts and bicycles. Honestly, I have never seen so many golf carts of so many different descriptions and full of so many well...old people in my life. They swarmed together like herds of impala and when they passed by Mary it was a virtual parade of the goofiest golf carts I've ever seen. In the mornings they were loaded to the gills with golfers, all dragging wheeled golf bags behind them. The empty spaces are rented out at anywhere from $66.00 to $77.00 per night with the space owner collecting 70% of the rent. The association fees are $319.00 per space. Do the math. Holy cow. The spaces are stacked in like cord wood and the people are highly social. You would have to be highly social to be stacked on your neighbors like bees in a hive.

We decided that we wanted to eat out on Tuesday night before we left. We were lounging in our chairs, under Mary's awning enjoying the desert air (it was fragrant with orange blossom...fantastic) when our neighbor drove in and got out of his car. John asked him for a recommendation on where to eat in town and he said a place called Oceans 111. His wife came out and suggested that we go early because it was St. Patrick's Day and everyone would be out. That struck me as a little weird. I never considered St. Patrick's Day to be a big night out unless of course you are Irish. So we went early and drove up to this restaurant which is built into the side of a hill...like a cave. It had a nice look about it when we walked up to the door. Then John pulled the door open and I was bowled over by a bad smell. I leaned toward him as we were approaching the reservations desk and said, "I hate to say this but this place smells a lot like a nursing home." He shrugged my comment off as we were seated. We ordered a nice bottle of wine and the waitress, who was very sweet, gave us our menus. John had been craving steak for the last two days so he ordered prime rib and I ordered sweet and sour chicken. We had an ahi appetizer that was really good. Then the waitress came and delivered the bad news about the prime rib. All they had left was the end cut. I looked at my watch. It was 5:30. Who ate the rest? So he got the menu again and ordered the herb roasted chicken. Great. A healthier choice. She delivered our dinners and John tried to put his fork into the chicken. He couldn't pierce it. He stabbed and dug while I ate my sweet and sour chicken and rice. Finally he gave up and set it aside. We shared my entree, which was fair at best, and ordered desert. Between the wine, the ahi and the desert our dinner was salvaged. As we exited the restaurant in the Camry at 7:00 I commented to John that there was no traffic. I mean zero traffic. I think we saw five cars on our way back to the RV Park which was about five miles. I said, "I figured out where all of the prime rib went!" John said, "Where?" I said, "They start serving dinner in the middle of the afternoon so people can be in bed by 7:30." He said, "No, I think it was leftovers from yesterday." We had a good laugh as we were entering the park.

In the land of the pink bus (click on the photo to enlarge it...it's worth it!)

We got past the gate and I turned left. John said he thought I should have turned right. I said no, that we turned right with the coach and were lost. He said, no, we turned right then right and we should have turned right and left. We were lost within 60 seconds. So we drove around the park marveling at the fact that there were St. Patrick's Day cookouts going on all over the place. I think as we get older we must look for any occasion to celebrate and toast our continued good health and good fortune. The thousand-plus people at Outdoor Resorts in Palm Desert are havin' a good time regardless of the bleak economic forecast!

Golf Course Road...it's something like the Yellow Brick Road!

We are now at Los Angeles Equestrian Center being buried in that grit and grime that I was concerned about in Ozona. It is gorgeous here though and the place is just hopping with equestrian activity. We have enjoyed our stay, visiting with the people at Bennett Farms and walking the trails in Griffith Park. Today we got a behind the scenes tour of the Los Angeles Zoo and both of us got to pet a full grown giraffe!

We are leaving in the morning to head back to Kentucky. We were going to make the trip to Oregon but apparently winter won't surrender on this first day of spring and they are closing mountain passes to buses and RV's. I'm disappointed that we won't get to see my family but really anxious to get home and enjoy the spring blossoms and all of the new foals in the pastures around Lexington. I'm getting reports that the dogwoods are in bloom and the grass is coming up green and beautiful. I can't wait to get home! I hope you all had a great week and enjoy the first weekend of spring!

Return to Baytown

The scene of last year's melt down in the road




I woke up in Baytown, Texas this morning...with a 'fro. The humidity here is playing unflattering tricks on my hair and curling the pages of our books and magazines. I slept under an open window last night and when I looked in the mirror this morning I nearly screamed at my reflection. My bangs looked like two big cork screws. For a second I thought I might have accidentally stuck my finger in the wall socket in the middle of the night.




It was near 80 degrees yesterday as we were approaching Baytown, the site of last year's one-way-street disaster and my subsequent melt down in the road. To recap, John was talking to Tre on his cell phone as we were pulling out of the RV park, "I'm really starting to get the hang of driving this coach," he said as I'm hopping up and down in my seat pointing at the one-way sign dead ahead of us (pictured above) and hollering "WRONG WAY, WRONG WAY!!" Check out last year's March blog post if you want to re-live all of the gory details.




So this year I tried to get us into another park so we could avoid a repeat of the entire circus act (dead battery on the Camry, Breezy and I sinking into Texas muck over the tops of our feet and such) but Murphy wasn't having any of that. After emailing the other RV park in town asking for a reservation and not getting an answer, I called and got a recording that said they were full. So I was forced to call the Houston East RV RESORT (that's a stretch) where we stayed last year . John was amazed that I remembered the details of the roads and the turns and the park. I'm not. When you are in a heightened state of stress those details brand themselves into your brain. So when I called the Houston East RV Resort the same nice lady, who I know thought we were the stupidest RVers in the history of RVers last year (and we probably were), answered the phone. I let her give me the details on how to drive under the Interstate in a U-turn lane and into the park off of the one way service road. I knew how to get there but I was trying to behave as though I was new to the park so that I wouldn't jar any memories loose and she would think, "Oh no, THOSE idiots again." We made the turns correctly this time and made it into the park and into our space without incident. When John it the air brake and shut Mary's motor off he laughed and said, "We've come a long way baby!" No kidding.




So we are traveling west through Texas now. We passed through Houston earlier this morning and I snapped a few pictures. The repair on Mary's skylight is holding even through some pretty hefty winds and thankfully we haven't had to test it in the rain...yet. It is cloudy and they are calling for some scattered thunderstorms today. If Murphy takes a snooze we may get through without rain.




















Houston. Click on this photo and read the sign in the lower left corner.




Yesterday we traveled on the roads from hell through Louisiana and east Texas. The trip from Milton, Florida to Baytown was a bit of a Deja Vu. I was hopeful that some work had been done on the roads but they looked and felt exactly like they did last year...terrible. I got up this morning and had to get some dog food out of one of Mary's lower bays so I jumped out and the first thing I noticed was that we lost another hub cap...the same one that we lost last year on the same stretch of road. If we continue to make this trip I'll have to start buying them by the dozen.





That brings me to the continuing saga of Monaco Coach Corporation. Just for the heck of it John called their number again yesterday. Now they have a recording saying that they have filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy law. They guided us to their website for contact information. So I went to their website and found a place to email them and ask to please allow us to buy a part for Mary's broken skylight. I haven't heard back from them yet. I would imagine the load of emails they got yesterday probably overloaded their server. If I get a hold of them I'll add a dozen hubcaps to the order.




I wouldn't have thought that the altitude from Tampa to Baytown would have been that much different. I'm puzzling over that at the moment. Mary has one of those two sided Sleep Number air beds. I like mine set on 50 and John's sleep number is 85. 85 feels like plywood to me. Funny how men and women are so different. So we had our dinner last night and settled in to flip channels and at 7:30 I looked over and John was fast asleep in his recliner. He woke up at 8:00 and shuffled off to bed. I stayed up and watched a little more television and at 9:00 I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer so off I went to bed. The room was stifling hot so I opened the windows and turned on Mary's Fantastic Fans (that's really what they are called) and got into bed. I thought the mattress felt a little firm but I was tired and fell asleep pretty quickly. Then I spent the rest of the night flopping around like a fish out of water. Every time I'd flop it went through my half-awake mind that I must have made a mistake and fell asleep on the dining room table instead of the bed. I woke up sore hips and shoulders this morning and a little cranky from disturbed sleep...not to mention my terrifying image in the mirror. When I checked the Sleep Number on my side it said "100". Murphy again. I wish the little bastard would take a powder and let us alone for a few days!




We just stopped in one of Texas's Picnic Areas so the dogs could stretch their legs. We are somewhere between Houston and San Antonio at the moment. I snapped the leashes on the dogs and we stepped out into gusty wind, wet humidity and the stench of cow shit. Some of my favorite things. I have my hair double banded into a snug ponytail to keep from looking like an escapee from a local institution. The dogs sniffed around while the wind knocked me around the area and when I stepped back into the coach John looked up from eating a banana with peanut butter at the dining table and cracked up. "What's funny?" I asked. "You should see your hair," he replied. I smirked. "Having a PICNIC?" I retorted. I've never quite understood the whole Picnic Area concept along side of a busy Interstate in Texas. Then I walked into the bathroom and looked at my hair. I screamed and went back to my co-pilot's seat where we have resumed being blown all over Interstate 10 on our way to a place called Ozona, Texas.




We aren't stopping in San Antonio this year because we need to get on to Scottsdale so I had to figure out where the half way point was between Baytown and Las Cruces, New Mexico where we will go tomorrow night. It turned out to be Ozona. I vaguely remember Ozona from our trip through west Texas last year. It stuck with me due to the unusual name and because we had gone so long without seeing any civilization that I began to have one of those Twilight Zone moments where you wonder if you have entered another dimension and are going to spend eternity driving in a motor coach through blasting wind, eating grit and looking like Frankenstein's sister (it's the hair thing again). I remember wondering what it would have been like to grow up in Ozona, Texas. I called the RV Park office at the Super 8 Motel in Ozona last night to make a reservation. The woman who answered the phone laughed like I was some crazy foreigner who didn't understand how things work in the United States of America. "Honey, you don't need a reservation! Just drive on in here and park!" she said. I thanked her and hung up. Stay tuned for our Ozona experience.




Okay, that's it for today. If you think of us, think of John wrestling Mary across Texas in this wind. We should be at our destination by late this afternoon. It might be time to break out the Scotch bottle again!





















Breezy and Ransom waiting for John to fill Mary up at Flying J

Murphy Rides Again

Ransom sacked out in the co-pilot's chair


We are in Tampa at the Gasparilla Charity Horse Show and it is really cold! Temperatures are near freezing at night and only into the 60's during the day. If you live in the north I hear you saying "Oh, cry me a river..." but for Florida it is really chilly. Really.



We arrived on Monday as scheduled and met up with our friends the Whitley's who also have a coach. They found the best spot to park and saved it for us. When we arrived their coach was looking all shiny and beautiful, clean tires and wheels, sparkling paint and glass. It turned out that a nice guy named Eddie has a car and RV detailing business and he offers his services to RV owners who stay at the fairgrounds. John looked at Whitley's coach, gave the work his approval and priced the service. It was half what they wanted to charge us in Vero Beach and he said that they would wash and wax the Camry too. Done deal.



Yesterday morning we got up and rolling and John headed over to the arena to watch horses work. I showered and got things tidied up, bed made, dishes done. At 9:00 Eddie showed up with his crew to wash and wax Mary and the Camry. They did the car first (it looks like new) and next they tackled Mary. Literally.



I was in the bathroom trimming my bangs when I heard Breezy growl and Ransom streaked the length of the coach, from the cockpit to the bedroom and back in three seconds. Next I heard the footsteps on the roof. They started at the top (normal). There is a lot of expensive stuff on the top of a motor coach. I was thinking to myself, as I was cutting bangs with a sharp instrument and listening to them march around the roof like a small herd of buffalo, that I hoped they didn't do anything to disturb the satellite dish or the air conditioners, or the automatic vented fans, or the...."CRACK, SNAP!!". I jumped straight up and dropped my scissors. Breezy barked and my eyes shot up at the skylight over the shower about a foot from where I was standing. It was inverted and suddenly there was more light coming through to the shower. A lot more light.


I heard a voice say, "OH NO. OH MAN...OH NO!" I won't write what I was saying.


I ran to my cell phone and called John. "You need to get back here NOW. Someone just broke the skylight." He groaned and hung up. Within two minutes I saw him pedalling his bicycle at about 50 miles per hour and I heard his voice. "What happened?"


The rest of the day was a three ring circus. Eddie, who was completely mortified, tried to reassure John that he could find a replacement part for the broken sun shade dome. There was a flurry of activity, people up on the roof and down on the ground, John in and out of the coach trying to reassure me that we would get it fixed before the sun set. I know better than that. You can't buy anything for this coach at Camping World. But I had my hands full with a real estate deal that we have been working on. Offers, counter offers and conference calls with a real estate group. At one point the negotiations were delayed because the agent was bitten by his dog and had to go to the hospital for stitches. That's when I started cleaning.


When I feel like things are totally running out of control my way of feeling like I have some effect on life is to clean. I clean like a Merry Maid gone mad. I vacuumed everything, cleaned all of the woodwork (that is a LOT of woodwork) cleaned the sinks, counters, toilet, windows and all of the leather (that is a LOT of leather) all the while John is madly trying to find a part to replace the broken skylight. When Robert (the big guy with the big feet) stepped on the dome it cracked in half and the actual clear skylight (on the inside) inverted. It looked a little like my bumper did when the woman backed into the Camry in the grocery store parking lot. John popped it back and it didn't crack. That was the happiest thing that happened before the sun set.

Eddie spent the day going to every RV supply and dealer in Tampa and the surrounding area. In the mean time John got on the phone to call Monaco (the coach maker) to see if they knew where we could get a part. I must explain here that if we leave it like it is at the moment and it rains we are going to end up with some serious damage to the roof due to leakage. So this must be fixed somehow before we can leave. Or before it rains. We are scheduled to pull out tomorrow morning.















Shiny clean Mary
















Spotless wheels and tires!


Okay, so John calls Monaco out in Oregon because our guy Dennis in Wakarusa, Indiana got laid off last year when they closed the Wakarusa plant. We miss Dennis and hope he is doing well. Between the fuel prices going through the roof and the downturn in the economy (hysterical understatement) the RV business has taken a bloody beating. Back to the story. John dials Monaco and gets a recording telling him that they are no longer doing anything but warranty work and that if our coach is on warranty (not) to go to a web address and email them.



John hung up and looked at me with a seriously stressed expression. "They aren't answering the phone," he says. I thought about all of the contacts that we had at Monaco a year ago, we are talking a ton of people, and my heart sank. Then I remembered that we have the cell number of the top customer service guy, the first person that we spoke to when we started thinking about buying a Monaco coach. John praised my memory (a rarity these days!) and got his business card out. He got him on the phone and got the low down. The top customer service guy had been laid off a month ago and on Monday (yes, day before yesterday) Monaco laid off 2,500 employees at the Oregon plant. They are nearly shut down except for warranty work. No parts. He said he would do what he could. John called him a good man and hung up with a seriously stressed look on his face. "They are effectively out of business," he says.



The rest of the day I spent between real estate people (not fun) and searching the Internet for Monaco parts or parts that would fit a Monaco. John called several places that I found and got some serious attitude about Monaco and their parts. A few people said that they would try and call us back but as of this morning we haven't heard from anyone.




Last night I saw John and Whitley with their heads together just before the horse show started. They concocted a plan that may work. It involves finding some heavy plastic and using the frame of the broken skylight to bolt it down. It could work. In the mean time our dear friend Tim out in Oregon is going to go to Monaco (he lives within 20 miles of the plant) to see if he can get the part that we need and bring it to Scottsdale, which is where we are headed if John can figure out how to temporarily fix the skylight.



So last night we had dinner here in our shiny clean Mary (Eddie made the service complimentary) and walked over to the horse show. We stayed until just before American Idol started and then came back to further our addiction to the program. We slept and got up and stared all over again today. John is on the phone, pacing up and down outside with his phone in his ear still working on finding the part. If that fails in the next few minutes he will head off to Home Depot for heavy plastic and miscellaneous tools to secure it.

















Sparkling Camry!



Breezy and Ransom were unhinged by all of the intense activity and upset around here so I took them for a well deserved long walk in the sun. It has warmed up outside so we trooped around the grounds and now they are taking their naps. Ransom looks like his skeleton dissolved in the co-pilot's seat with his head draped off of the edge of the seat. He has turned into a regular comedian keeping us in stitches continuously. Dogs are great for stress relief...a prescription that we need at the moment! I got back to Mary and discovered that I had stepped into some kind of sticky calking so I spent 20 minutes picking it out of the treads of my tennis shoe. I read on the Internet that you can remove chewing gum with mayonaise so I smeared it on my shoe and it is sitting on the counter hopefully loosening the sticky crap. Fun.



The good news is that Eddie and his crew did a beautiful job on cleaning the coach and the car, we are healthy and happy and John is on the roof installing some kind of black rubber material over the skylight so that we can leave in the morning. Life is good!

Getting Ready to Hit the Road

Photo credit: Rick Metzger 2006

We are getting ready to say goodbye to the hibiscus, orange blossoms, the Indian River and Atlantic Ocean and head west to the desert. It has been a restful and warm winter with the exception of a side trip to Lexington to fix a small disaster in the kitchen of our townhouse. During a big ice storm the hot water valve on the dishwasher broke and it did all kinds of fun stuff to the cabinets, not to mention killing the dishwasher and garbage disposal so we spent two weeks working on that project and checking on our horse herd.

All is well in Lexington so we will be spending the next month on the road in Mary. We will take the same route that we took last year through Louisiana and Texas, stopping at some shows along the way, landing in Scottsdale for a week for the Carousel show and then into California and on to Oregon before we make our way back to Lexington for the spring and summer months. Mary has been wintering in a nice storage place up the road in Sebastian, Florida. We stopped by the other day to begin packing her and found that her hide-away television, located in the front over the cockpit, was stuck in the ceiling. A quick phone call to Bob, our trusty technician at Monaco in Oregon gave us the trick to fix her and in 30 seconds the TV was working perfectly. She is in great shape and we are getting anxious to get rolling again.

Breezy and Ransom have enjoyed their winter too. When we are here we can leave the sliding glass door open so that they can go in and out at their leisure. Well there really isn't much leisure for Breezy being the busy Border Collie that she is but Ransom...he is a sun worshiper! The dog lays around like a little lizard on the pavers by the pool in the afternoons. Even when he gets so warm that he starts panting he will just lay there and soak up sun and heat. Mornings are for chasing each other around the yard and the pool and afternoons for beach walks. As I said, they have had a good winter!

I'm working on a blog for John's business that should be finished in a week or two. We have a handy dandy little video camera made by Kodak that is about the size of a cell phone. It takes great videos and doesn't require disks or anything other than plugging it into my computer and downloading the video to email or upload to the blog so expect to see some video of our horses and horses that we video in our travels.

I will be keeping this blog updated regularly on our tour around the country so check back often. I hope you all had a safe and cozy winter! Spring is just 21 days away and for we daylight lovers Daylight Savings time starts in TEN DAYS!! YAAAYYYYY!!!!!!!

Holiday Follies or BAH HUMBUG

Ransom soaking up the sun in the house

Okay. I admit it. I'm not a big fan of Christmas. Call me Scrooge Jones. Over the years I've tried to blame it on the weather, the shortened days, melancholy over being away from home and a host of other things. I just don't like the holidays. Period.

I know now it isn't the weather because we are currently in the most perfect weather anyone could ask for in Vero Beach, Florida. It is sunny nearly every day and has been hovering in the mid to upper seventies for a month. We have a lovely home here and our activities include daily walks on the beach with the dogs, swimming in the pool, sunning in the courtyard, sleeping, cooking, reading, bike riding...it really is a wonderful, restful spot. So it isn't the weather. Or the location.

When I lived in Oregon my sister Linda and I used to celebrate the winter solstice with a day at the art museum and dinner out or some similar activity. It was a celebration of surviving the dark days (in Oregon with the rain they are usually dark all day) and the fact that from December 21st to June 21st they got longer...a celebration of hope in a way...hope that we get through the dark days without having to talk each other down from the ledge. Okay, not quite that bad but bad. Since I've moved from Oregon and am now spending the holidays in Florida that hasn't been as much of an issue. In fact it is pretty much a non-issue. I do prefer the longer days of late spring and summer but getting daily sunshine seems to have alleviated the bad case of the drearies that I used to suffer from when I was geographically farther north. So it isn't the short days.

Breezy in Simpsonville before Thanksgiving

Being away from home on Christmas isn't it either although I do miss my family but I miss them all year long not just at Christmas. I've been home a couple of times in the last eight years at Christmas and it didn't seem to stop my out of sorts mood, my inclination to let my inner hermit take over my life and my constant clock watching in anticipation of when it will be over and we can get back to some sort of a normal life. So it isn't being away from home either.

The reasons I don't like Christmas have more to do with the greed, gluttony and some of the more bizarre traditions like cutting down a perfectly healthy tree, dragging it into your house, covering it with a bunch of stuff that you store for a year and use for two weeks, and installing lights on it thus turning it into a top of the line fire hazard (for those of you with children I do totally understand your delight in this ritual so please don't take this personally...it is my neurosis talking). And I despise the mall. I despise it in February, June and November. I totally detest it in December. The Internet has helped with mall-haunting issues but the bigger problem with shopping is what to get everyone. We all buy for pretty much the same people, pretty much all of our lives. At my age that is a long time. I'm finding as I get older that I want for a lot less and I assume that others are the same way so you have to become very inspired to buy gifts that are meaningful or at the very least useful and do not require dusting. Our family and friends mostly get food from us. Not meaningful and usually too high calorie to be useful. And very uninspired. So on top of everything else I suffer from a guilt trip for not finding inspiring gifts or for sending the same things year after year.

Show down between Ransom and the mini horse

On the food thing: I try every year to stay away from sweets and not over eat. Every year I swear that I'm not going to over eat. Every year I fail. The Christmas season is designed to highlight my weaknesses not my strengths. We always get yummy cookies (my biggest weakness in life) and candy and wonderful high calorie foods that are guaranteed to add that extra layer of goo around my waist, on my hips and thighs, and to those funny things that we get under our arms when we arrive at the time of life called "middle age"...what ARE those flaps for anyway? I gleefully (my only glee in December) indulge myself in sweets to counter the feelings of depression about the holiday. Christmas dinner is an excuse to gorge ("It's Christmas!" I say trying to find some way, ANY way to feel festive and in the spirit) and I eat until I can't either continue sitting or stand up. Laying down is the only alternative. By New Years when I get on the scale (tomorrow is dooms day) I'll cuss myself and the stupid holiday again because I (me and me alone) added five pounds of useless fat to my body in attempt to enjoy a holiday that I don't like. How stupid can I be???

During the holidays people are supposed to be happier, more forgiving, more generous. NOT TRUE. I'm beginning to suspect that there are a lot more people out there like me who rate Christmas below Root Canal on their list of favorite things in life.

Wandering down the beach

Case in point: Right after we got here, not long after Thanksgiving, I went to the grocery store. Before I tell you my tale I have to explain that here in Vero Beach you will find a lot of retired people...very OLD retired people. And there are a lot of wealthy OLD retired people here...grumpy, wealthy OLD retired people. And they are grumpy, wealthy, OLD, retired, and horrendous drivers. And they all drive either Mercedes sedans, Cadillac sedans, or Ford Mustangs. I suspect that Ford is behind the other two American car companies in the race to bankruptcy because of all of the grumpy, wealthy, OLD retired people in Vero Beach who are living out their NASCAR dreams on the highways around here in shiny new, hopped up Ford Mustangs. It would be funny if it wasn't so scary to look up and see a Mustang careening down the road toward you appearing driverless due to the fact that the person who is piloting the car is so old that he/she has shrunk to the point where they can no longer see over the steering wheel of the car. The ones who drive the big sedans aren't quite as scary because they rarely drive over 30 miles per hour. That only bothers me when I get stuck behind them on the Intercoastal highway A1A...which is ALL OF THE TIME. I use A1A (no choice) to get from home to town and back to home.

Okay, back to my shopping stories. Grocery shopping isn't a favorite thing to do unless I know I'm not going to encounter a herd of folks shopping at the same time. Then I kind of enjoy it. The traffic problems inside of the grocery store closely resemble the traffic problems on the streets and in the parking lots of Vero Beach so the entire experience is usually a hair raising one. My instructions to John when I leave the house for groceries are that if I'm not back in two hours to call the local police department because I've probably been locked up for road rage...or shopping cart rage. You think I'm kidding. I'm not proud to tell you that I lost my patience in one of the local Publix stores one day and ran over a woman's foot with my cart. On purpose. It wasn't one of my finer moments but she was one of those shoppers who gets in front of you and stops in the middle of the aisle so you can't get around her on either side and walks away from her cart leaving the rest of us stacked up in the aisle behind her hollering "EXCUSE ME" while she ignores you and gawks at everything. Well after four or five pile ups and the woman behind me actually running into me with her cart, I lost it and floor boarded my cart around the gawker in front of me and well...her foot was sticking out and I...AIMED AT IT AND RAN OVER IT. She said "ouch!" I looked over my shoulder and saw her wandering back to her cart, glaring at me but she wasn't limping so I pushed on. I had a small concern that I may be arrested for assault before I finished shopping but she apparently was too busy gawking to report me. I have not returned to that particular Publix store since then.

So after we got here I had to go and stock up on things. It was just after Thanksgiving so I planned my trip and drove to the Publix on 12th and US 1. It is a nice store and not normally as crowded as the one at Miracle Mile a few miles away. I parked, did my shopping and when the bagger offered to take my groceries to the car I looked behind me in the line to see a bunch of older people so I said, "Thanks anyway but I can get it. Help those people behind me." I'm not totally heartless. I pushed my cart to my car and as I was putting the groceries in the trunk a car horn blared in the parking lot scaring me out of seven years of life. My heart was pounding and I was instantly mad.

I have to explain to the people who haven't spent time in Florida that it is populated like California...totally without natives. They all left because the eastern, hypertensive, type A personalities that make gobs of money in their working years all moved here to retire. I have to assume that their only outlet for their hypertensive behavior after retirement is honking at people on the road. When I learned to drive (a whole other blog post) I was told that a horn was used as a warning tool (if you knew my mother and her teaching techniques you would understand why I only use my horn if there is a tsunami, tornado or impending apocalypse and I have to get home). If someone is attempting to run you off of the road, back into you or is exhibiting other dangerous behavior that is an appropriate time for most people to honk. I was told (in no uncertain terms) that you don't honk unless you absolutely have to. Most of the people in the Northwest adhered to that rule of thumb as well so when you heard a car horn it snapped you to attention. Not so in Florida. In Florida they honk because they are grumpy old people who think they own the damn road or are pissed off because they can't manage other people's lives anymore. Or they took seriously, "Honk if you're..." Well never mind.

Okay, so I'm putting groceries in my trunk and I hear this looooonnnggg horn blast. I jumped nearly hitting my head on the trunk lid and turned to see a parking lot drama unfolding. I wish I would have had the video camera. In the row of parking spaces behind me there was a woman in a brand new black Mercedes SL500 trying to back out of her space. I would guess her to be in her 50's. She was about three spaces in from the front of the store, a prized space if you can get it. Behind her was a little OLD lady driving a Cadillac sedan. I knew it was a lady only because her Q-tip white hair was showing just over the dash board Apparently she pulled in and discovered that the woman in the black SL was leaving so she decided to back up to take the space. The problem with that was that there was a man in a nice BMW convertible (top up) behind her and she was going to back into him (a good time to use your horn). He didn't just toot his horn though, he laid on it. I saw him try to back up to get out of her way but there was someone behind him so he was stuck. She kept backing and he kept honking until she stopped short of running into him. The only way out of the jam was for the little old lady in the big old sedan to drive on and find another space. Not happening. Instead she pulled up while the poor woman in the black SL was trying to get the hell out of the space and blocked her. By this time I was leaning against my car to watch this scenario unfold. I watched as the little old lady put her car in reverse and tried to back over the guy in the BMW again! Again he laid on his horn so she didn't back into his car. Believe it or not this scenario repeated itself through one more complete cycle before the person in the car behind the BMW decided to get the hell out of Dodge. That car pulled around the entire group and finally the BMW had room to get out of the way, the little old lady in the big sedan backed out into traffic blocking the incoming and outgoing cars until the poor (by now frazzled) woman in her beautiful 500SL was able to escape from the entire scene. I finished putting my groceries in the car and drove away, grateful that I wasn't involved in the parking lot incident.

Just a few days before Christmas I decided to take the bull by the horns and go to the Miracle Mile Publix and do the shopping for the Christmas meal. It is a newer and bigger store than the 12th Street Publix. So I got in my trusty little Camry and drove into town. The first thing I encountered was a guy on a bicycle at the intersection of Indian River Boulevard and 20th Street. He was riding the wrong direction (into traffic) and was hollering some nonsensical stuff at traffic (that would be me because I was first in line to drive by the kook). He nearly drove up the hood of my car. I refrained from using my horn fearing that I would scare him to death and I would not only have the guilt of not buying the right gifts and eating too much but the additional guilt of killing a kook during the holidays. I stopped as he cruised by my window shouting obcenities at no one in particular and continued on my journey to the store. Looking back I think the kook incident was a warning from the universe to go home and try another day. But I pushed on, found a space in the busy parking lot and went in to do my shopping. As I pushed around the store I noticed that a lot of people looked really out of sorts and I actually practiced my best manners through the entire experience. I made a note to myself to try to be tolerant and kind and practice my best behaviors on this shopping day. It was sort of an experiment to see if I could change the experience by changing my attitude. When I scratched the last item off of my list I headed for the checkout.

I got to the check out at the same time as a lady who had a hand basket and a just a few items. I actually got there just ahead of her but I said, "Go ahead of me please. You will be here all day if you get behind me." She looked at me with suspicion. "Are you sure?" she asked with a look that said I might pull a gun on her if she stepped in line ahead of me. "Yes, really, it's okay. Please go ahead of me." She skirted my cart with her back to the check stand and started putting her items on the conveyor belt. Then she said, "Thank you very much. I didn't want to invade your personal space." I was beginning to think this woman was an escapee from the local mental hospital until she explained herself. She said, "I was just on my way in here from the parking lot and I saw an old lady struggling with a case of water. She was trying to get it into her trunk so I stopped to help. When I reached for the water she snapped at me, 'Get out of my personal space! Did I ask you for your help?! What makes you think I can't do this on my own?!' She continued, "You know, I just wanted to be nice and help her and she started yelling at me. What's wrong with this picture? I'm being helpful and she's hollering at me for that." I commiserated with her about people while she was checking out telling her that this time of year was more dangerous than most. I wished her luck on the way out and she said, "Well if you see an old woman out there with A LOT of jewelry on steer clear of her." Next came checking my groceries out. That went well and the checker and the bagger were very nice. I decided to let the bagger help me out in case I ran into the elderly psycho woman with too much jewelry. As we were exiting the store she told me about trying to direct one woman into the "In" door so that she didn't get run over by all of the people coming out of the "Out" door. The woman got mad and started wagging her finger at her and hollering, "I DON'T CARE. Do you understand, "I DON'T CARE!" She said that if it weren't for risking her job she would have told her, "Fine. Get run over. I DON'T CARE either." So she kindly put my groceries in my car and I wished her good luck and happy holidays and got in my car. I'd been gone nearly two hours and I didn't want John to call the police so I called him to tell him that I had survived the store and was on my way home. I hung up and started the car.

I have one more gripe to register before I finish this tale of grocery shopping woe. I drive a car most of the time. Sometimes I drive the 4-Runner when we are home but mostly it is the car. So when I'm looking for a parking spot I tend to look for one that does not have trucks and SUV's on either side of it. I'm usually successful in that pursuit. But it never fails that when I come out of the store I'm surrounded by trucks and SUV's. Never fails. It didn't on this particular occasion either.

So I started my car grumbling about not being able to "%#@!!" see around these monster vehicles to get out and when I determined that the coast was clear I started to back out. I continued to do the round check (side mirror, rear view mirror, other side mirror and over my shoulder) and when I looked over my shoulder I saw a black Honda Accord backing quickly out of the space directly behind and across from me. The decision was horn or get out of the way. All of my good training (not so good) said NO HORN (I have taken no horn to an art form) so I grabbed the gear shift to put it in drive and move out of the way when I heard the crunching noise and felt my beloved little Camry groan and jump. Both of us put our cars in drive, pulled into our spaces and the woman (who wasn't old...probably my age...well not exactly young either) got out of her car and immediately started apologizing and asking if I was okay...you know the drill. I looked at my rear bumper and it was inverted on the side like a giant dimple. I groaned. I ran my hand over it. I groaned again. I looked at her car and it had a little bit of Camry paint on it and that was it. We exchanged information while she apologized ten more times. I said, "Have a merry Christmas," before we parted company. She apparently didn't think she heard me right and then she decided that she did and said in a surprised voice, "You have a happy holiday too!" and we went our separate directions.

Then I tried to back out of the space again. Of course I was punchy as hell but I started to pull out again and nearly had the same accident with a big old beat up pick-up truck. I pulled back into the space, took a deep breath, looked carefully and tried to pull out again. A guy walked right behind me while I was backing out and I had to stomp on the brakes not to run over him. By this time I was thinking that I just didn't have the right attitude about all of this. So I changed to road-rage mode, slammed the Camry in gear and blasted out of the space. I scattered two people who were attempting to walk behind me (Question: Do you walk in the path of a moving car? I don't. It's DANGEROUS). I managed to get out of the parking lot with my injured car and then called John. I asked, "Could we go to Mexico or to a remote island for the holidays next year?" He asked why. I recounted my sad story. He reminded me that they celebrate Christmas in Mexico. That's out.

There is a happy ending to my holiday story. Jason and Jennifer, John's grown kids were on their way down from Charlotte to spend the holiday with us. Jason has the fix-it gene so when he got here he and John went out into the driveway and a few minutes later they came in and asked me to come out. When I got out there I found the Camry bumper re-inverted to nearly new condition. There is a small crack in it that can be fixed with some epoxy I'm told. They stayed with us for four days and we had a lot of fun and we enjoyed their company a lot. They were understanding of our sort of UnChristmas celebration too. We ate a nice dinner on Christmas Eve ate leftovers on Christmas and played a Cranium tournament...three nights of hilarity. We would have had fun no matter what time of the year but Christmas gave them a nice vacation so we had something to be happy about this year.

Jennifer, Jason and Breezy unwrapping presents

This is the end of my rant about the holidays (aren't you relieved?). My best estimate is that we will be on the road again by mid February. I don't think John can sit still much longer than that! I'll be blogging more regularly then...Barb! Larry told me about your displeasure that I've taken a break from posting so now you have to listen to my tales of life while we are planted here in Florida! Hee, hee, hee! We wish all of you (or y'all) the happiest and healthiest new year ever!

Fall into Winter

Pine Needles Lane

November 17

We woke up to a dusting of snow yesterday morning. It always snows here at least a little bit (and sometimes a lot) before Thanksgiving. John is currently in Kansas City judging the American Royal and I'm in Lexington trying to stay warm. The recent memories of warm desert sun and light weight cotton clothing are...torturing me! I'm not much of a cold weather person anymore. Having lived in the mountains in Oregon (which are gorgeous) where the weather can dip into the subzero zone during the winter left me with a new natural instinct. Like the birds I want to fly south at the first hint of winter chill.

On our walking path

When we got home we were greeted with 70 plus degree days, bright sunshine and beautiful fall foliage. I immediately resumed my three mile a day walks around the neighborhood. We live in a pretty development of brick and stone and it is covered with paved pathways for the residents to walk or ride bikes on. Walking is my favorite form of exercise and around here it doubles as meditative and therapeutic as well giving me my nature fix. On our walks (usually with Ransom or Breezy) we see birds of all descriptions, cardinals (my favorites...there are none in Oregon), gold finches, Eastern blue jays which are spectacularly colored creatures and there are three red tailed hawks that hang around a certain area of the path hunting ground critters. There are rabbits and squirrels (Ransom being a squirrel dog by nature is particularly engaged in their activities), ground hogs (they are a kick!) and neighborhood cats and dogs. The paths are mostly tree covered so they are spectacular in the spring, summer and fall.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about our trip to South Africa last November/December. This is the time of year that we were getting ready to go. Our travel companions, Gene and Annalize van der Walt are natives of South Africa, living in Oregon now and are going back to South Africa for the Christmas holidays this year. I've been emailing with Annalize a little bit and we both are feeling the same strange and wonderful melancholy about our trip last year.

We traveled for three weeks and had the absolute trip of a lifetime. We arrived in Cape Town, spent some wonderful time there and exploring the Western Cape. It is spectacular. The only place that I could compare it to is the coastal areas of California. We traveled to Swellendam, a small farming community and stayed at a 19th century bed and breakfast that didn't have electric lights in the dining room (we ate a heavenly dinner and breakfast by candle light) and our rooms over looked a pasture full of sheep. I grew up on a farm in the country so we opened the windows and let the fresh air flow through the room. I slept like an old dog! It was an incredible time. We boarded The Blue Train in Cape Town and traveled on the luxury overnight train (much like the Orient Express) out of the Cape, across the Karoo, a very dry and beautiful landscape enjoying gourmet meals and wonderful South African wines. Our destination was Johannesburg where we boarded a flight to Kruger National Park in the northern part of South Africa. We spent a magical week in the bush at two different resorts getting up close and personal with elephants, rhino, giraffes, zebra, leopards, lions and cheetah (just to mention a few). I will never forget sitting in an open topped Land Rover while a breeding herd of elephants filtered around us like we weren't even there! Or sitting six feet from a cheetah while he finished his kill and then following him while he chirped for his hunting mate. There was so much to love about the trip, the country, the weather, the people, the food, the accommodations and just the experience of being that close to nature was incredible. And to share it with good friends made it all the more special. If I live to be 100 the images, scents and sounds will never leave me.

Sunrise in the bush

Photo taken from our Land Rover

When we flew out of Kruger on a tiny little gnat of a plane (that I was positively terrified of!) my fear of crashing melted away when I looked out the window at the expanse that our guide referred to as "de boosh" and felt a new and wonderful connection to the continent of our origin. I said that I planned to go back and do it again but I'm not sure now that I would. I don't think that we could duplicate the sheer perfection of our experience there. Something tells me that I have imprinted those experiences in a most perfect way and I don't want to change that. So maybe our next big adventure will be to Australia to see the Outback or to Peru to see Machu Picchu, two of the places on my list of things to experience before I leave the planet. Time will tell!

In the mean time we will be gallivanting around our own beautiful country in Mary. We will be in Florida after Thanksgiving with Breezy and Ransom. I'll keep you posted on our travel plans from there. We wish everyone very happy holidays and a healthy and wonderful new year!!

Turkey Hunt