Merry Christmas Everybody!!

I hope you all had a great time celebrating Christmas. We certainly enjoyed spending it with Doug's Dad and his big family. But, let me start from where I left of last time.

I can't believe that we have been in Mission for two months now already. Time really seems to be flying this time. At last I have the kitchen arranged in a way that I don't have to move five things just to get to one bowl. It took me a while, but I think it will be a lot easier getting to things, specially when we are traveling again and I just don't have the patience to move everything around just to get to one dish. It does feel good to get something accomplished. I padded myself on the back :-).

Since we started traveling we have been collecting hat pins. When we had our house in New Jersey we collected magnets from the places we went to and they all ended up on our fridge. Well, a RV fridge is not magnetic so we found some nice hat pins and in the last rig I just pinned them to the curtains. Well, then we had to get a new rig and of course this rig does not have curtains. So for the last few months all my hat pins have been in a Ziploc bag waiting for me to figure out something that will work. After a few debates on what to do we decided on putting up a cork board. Now Doug does not like the look of cork board, so I bought a piece of fabric and lined the board with it. I have to say it looks pretty good and it sure was fun to look at the pins again and remember the places where we got them from.


Earlier this year we went to see the Alamo and the Riverwalk in San Antonio before we came down to Mission. We like it so much, we promised ourselves that we would come back when they have the place decorated with all the Christmas lights. There is over 120,000 lights installed and it takes them two months to do this. Well, since we were going up to Austin for Christmas anyway, it seemed like a good idea to spend an evening in San Antonio to check out all the lights. So on Tuesday we went to see the lights at the Riverwalk.




This was the view from our room on the 26th floor of the Marriott Riverwalk.



Wednesday we went to Austin to spend Christmas Eve with Doug's Dad and his family. Chris (Doug's Dad) has married into a big family and by the time everybody arrived we were about seventeen people. Dinner was delicious and you should have seen the floor after we all unwrapped our presents :-). Here are just some of the people in attendance.



Today we drove back home and are now recuperating from a great holiday party.

Happy Holidays!!

It is freeeeeezing outside. Woke up this morning and it was 42 degrees at 8 am. The wind had started blowing hard the night before, but the temperature was still at 75 degrees when we came back from the Festival of Lights in Hidalgo. It never really warmed up today (high was about 53 degrees), but at least the wind decided to stop around dinner time and the temperatures are supposed to be back in the 70's tomorrow.

December pretty much started of the same way. For a few days it is in the high 80's and the next couple of days the temperature drops by about 30 degrees. Well, it got me in the mood to decorate the rig inside for Christmas. It is so nice to have the whole back counter space to decorate.





It's starting to feel like Christmas in the Frank's household :-).

Yesterday we went to the Festival of Lights in Hidalgo with a group of 25 people from our community. It turned out to be a lot of fun and I am glad we did not go with the group today, since we are both fighting a cold since Sunday and it is freezing outside. I guess the drastic changes in temperature finally got to us.


I never rode in a horse drawn carriage before and since there was not really room for all 25 of us, Doug and I got to sit up front with the driver. It was quite an experience having a first class seat.


The whole town participates in this event and we took a 45 minute tour through Hidalgo at night looking at these beautiful light displays.


I just loved the butterfly so much and there was a whole bunch of them as well as some peacocks. Unfortunately, the battery in the camera started to run down, since I was trying to take to many pictures in a short time.

Back at City Hall, we saw these two beautiful dragons made out of small medicine bottles filled with colored water in honor of the Olympics in China this year.



All in all it was a pretty nice evening.

Update

Again, almost two weeks have passed and we have been pretty busy. I started looking at the Ikea catalog online and we found a wall unit that we liked. After calling them in Houston to make sure that the parts were available, we went to Houston to pick it up. We decided to go on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and it was a long day, driving all together 700 miles round trip, but I believe it was worth it. Travel was bad leaving Houston around 2:30 pm, but we arrived safely back home at 8:30 pm.


We took our time putting it together, but by Sunday I was starting to fill it up already.

The next day was Thanksgiving and we spend a beautiful afternoon with our friends celebrating with a huge feast.






We actually had five different tables full with food. There were three turkeys, a lot of vegetable dishes, one table for rolls and stuffing, another with nothing but deserts and one for all the appetizers. It really was a true feast and a good time was had by all, even though it was so hot that we had to use suntan lotion and tried to find some shade. Well, we did have some leftovers and decided to meet again the next day at the clubhouse and devour the leftovers. It was just as delicious the second day and was just as much fun.

In the meantime, we have also passed our physicals for this year and the only doctor left is the dentist (not my favorite). We were lucky to find a good family doctor and are set for another year :-). It is a good thing to be healthy!! We also started the Southbeach Diet three weeks ago and are hoping to be slimmer by the time we go back on the road again. So far it has been working.

We started to decorate the inside and outside of the rig for Christmas this week and pictures are to follow. Next week we are going on a horse drawn wagon ride in Hildago to see their famous festival lights. Hopefully I will be able to take some pictures. See you guys later!!

Back in Mission !!!

As most of our friends know, we have been back in Mission since October 22nd. I have been trying to get caught up with the blog since then, but we really have been pretty busy.

First we had to get settled back in and open up the coach house, which survived the summer without any problem. That made me very happy. We started to shop for some furniture for the coach house, but have not had any luck yet. I want a wall unit, where I can store all the stuff we hauled around this year and never used, but everything down here seems to be very massive looking and made out of dark wood. Ikea, where are you when I need you!!!!! The closest one is 300 miles away and that is so much to drive just to look for a wall unit and have to drive it back here, if we find something we like. So we might have something build for us. As if I needed another project for right now!

The first thing we did after we got back was to give both our vehicles a well deserved bath. It is amazing just how dirty the cars and the rig get when traveling down the road. I started on the rig this week, but it will take me a while to finish it. It is still to hot in the daytime to work on it while the sun is beating down on you. I am sure my friends from the east coast fully understand my dilemma :-). The weather was pretty much in the high 80 low 90 degrees in the daytime and about 70 degrees in the nighttime for the last three weeks. And then the first real cold front came through last night. I actually got the electric heater out and it got down to 40 degrees here last night. For us that is really cold!!!! Daytime temps for the next few days are supposed to be in the mid 70's, which will be fine for me, since I want to continue cleaning/waxing the rig.

Another one of my projects is our small "garden" at our RV site. The roses are still blooming like crazy and I have to trim off the old blooms every week to make sure the new ones can still come up for a while.


I wonder how much longer we will have roses. They are just so beautiful. We also have this bluish ground cover plant that has been attracting a ton of butterflies each day.

They look like Monarchs, but I have been told that the Monarchs left about two months ago. We can easily have about twenty butterflies on this bush in the afternoon and it looks so pretty. I really love sitting outside and watch the butterflies. Two other ladies and I have started our own vegetable garden this year and are growing bell peppers, tomatoes, green beans, peas, lettuce, scallions and radishes. We could not find plants for most of the veg's and started them from seeds. They actually started growing within a week. The sun and humidity really are helping us with our garden. It is just amazing to me, since I never had a vegetable garden in my life.

To add to all this excitement, Doug's right foot started acting up already again and we finally went to a foot specialist to find out what is going on. He has been having problems throughout the summer, but normally about every two months. This time it did not take four weeks for the pain to return. It is hard to go to a doctor when you travel as much as we do, since most of them want to see you for a follow up. Well, it is good that we are stationary for a while now. We got an appointment, the doctor wrapped and taped his foot and gave him some heavy pain/anti-inflammatory pills and asked us to come back in a week. Doug has capsulites (inflammation of the ligaments around the joint in his foot) and an inflamed/swollen nerve in his ankle. We went for the follow-up visit last Friday and the wrap came of. He is feeling much better and now has insoles for his shoes. If that does not help the swollen nerve, he will have to have shots. We will go back this coming Friday for another evaluation. I am so happy that we are here for a while and can take care of this problem. It has been on my mind a lot, since at one point this summer we had to stay for an extra day on a long drive, because he was in to much pain to drive the truck. That is really scary to me, but again, we will get it all fixed hopefully while we are down here. I have also found a primary care physician and we will get our physicals later this month. It was time to establish a family doctor again, since we are running out of medications and have not seen a doctor since we left New Jersey.

There has been a lot more things that we have done in the last three weeks, but I don't want to bore you guys and most of it has to do with housekeeping and making this new rig our HOME. As you can see, it has been a busy time, especially when you have "Happy Hour" every day at 4 pm and then there is the water aerobics three times a week. Life is just sooooooo stressful down here :-). I would not trade it for anything else right now.

I promise I will update you guys again, but it might not be every Sunday as I have tried to do over the summer. Things will slow down here eventually and we will be just hanging and relaxing for a while. It sounds so good. So stop by in about every two weeks and we should have some more stuff to report.

Austin - San Antonio, TX

Well, I was going to get all caught up with the blog last Sunday, but then we had to go to a shrimp cook-off in San Isabel and by the time we got back I was to tired and stuffed to continue the blog. Life down here in Mission is really stressful :-).

So we arrived at the Rio Campground in Sattler, TX on October 14Th. It is so nice to come back to a campground with no airport, highway, or railroad noises anywhere near. It seems that a lot of RV parks, that we have seen during our travels this year, are around these places. So we were guaranteed a good night sleep. We wanted to see San Antonio last year when we were staying at Spring Branch, but somehow never got around to it. Well, this time we took the opportunity and we got to see the Alamo.


It was pretty interesting to walk through the old buildings and I got another history lesson, which I have been enjoying during our travels this year. Next was the "River Walk", which reminded me somewhat of Italy, with the various water canals going right through this shopping and restaurant mecca. We decided to take one of the river boats and I am glad we did. There is no way we could have walked this whole area, it is so huge. They decorate the trees with Christmas lights after Thanksgiving and I think we will go back to see that. I really liked all the restaurants with their outside dining at the canal, since that is something you really don't find in the US.

We went to visit with Doug's dad and family over the weekend and went out for a nice dinner. By Tuesday it was time to move on and finally go back to Mission.

Heading South for the Winter

I know it has been a while since I have posted to our blog, but we have been so busy since we left Hutchinson, KS. Well, actually it has been so long that I had to go back into the blog to see were I left off.

We spend a couple of days in Thackerville, OK, which is about 5 miles from the Texas border. We arrived late Saturday afternoon and found a spot in the campground were our friends could park next to us. We were pretty much the biggest rig in the park until three of our friends, who also had been at the rally in Hutchinson, joined us Sunday afternoon. It was a lot of fun seeing them pull in and we had to have "Happy Hour" as soon as they were set up. After spending the last six month pretty much by ourselves, it has been really good to spend time with our friends again. Gail and Bonnie left on Monday morning and the rest of us decided to leave on Tuesday morning to head on south on our different destinations. In the end we will all end up in Mission sooner or later.

We had decided to go on to Austin to visit with Doug's dad for about a week before heading south for the winter to Mission. Everything went well through for Fort Worth and our first stop was south of Fort Worth at a rest area. We have had some drizzle and Doug just mentioned that his windshield needed a good downpour to be clean again. If he ever says that again, I will smack him. It did not take 10 minutes and we go into a downpour so bad that I could not see the rig anymore. Going 45 m/h and having my emergency flashers on, I fought my way through the rain as I am being passed by the big trucks, who of course dump more water on me as they pass me. Luckily the rain only lasted about 15 minutes and it cleared up again. We went through two more short downpours before we finally reached Austin about 3 pm. We had stayed south of Austin last fall and decided to go back to that campground in the hill country of Texas.

It was such a nice feeling to walk into a campground and they actually have you in their computer already. It makes checking in so much faster :-).

Hutchinson, KS

It has been 10 amazing days since we left Maysville, KS. We arrived in Hutchinson Wednesday a week ago to attend the MDT gathering. Well, since Henry and Devina had problems coming down from New Hampshire and did not arrive until Friday, we pretty much just hung around with all our friends from Retama Village and made a few new ones at the daily happy hour. We had so many snacks and goodies at happy hour that I really did not have to cook dinner. It feels so good to catch up with people we know after spending the summer traveling pretty much just by ourselves. When you stay only seven days in one spot it is hard to make new friends. Most of our time was spent checking out the area we were visiting.

On Saturday the HDT rally started and as many of you know, we do not have a big rig. It was no problem at all. We were welcomed into the group as one of them, which I thought was pretty cool. The week went by with daily seminars for the guys and of course happy hour every day. On Wednesday we had a ladies day. A bus was chartered, we went shopping in a couple of towns outside of Hutchinson and had a great lunch in a local Amish restaurant. Believe or not, I actually drove one of these big trucks in the campground and this time it did not die on me when I first started of.


Can you believe I actually drove one of those. It is so intimidating to me, I am not convinced that we should get one. Since our Teton Homes is bigger, it also is heavier and the truck drives a lot rougher with all that weight, which is hell on Doug's back. We have to go over scales to see how much we really weigh and make a decision on what comes next. There are trucks out there that are not quite as big that would make it easier for Doug to go down the road. At this point we will check out a guy in Texas and then think about it some more when we are back in Mission.

Friday afternoon was set aside for a group picture. Now I thought that meant that it was going to be a picture of the people that attended the rally. I was soooooo wrong. They took a picture of all the trucks with the people that drive them. It took about 30 minutes just to line them all up.


Well, after they were all done with their big rig pictures, we were allowed to bring in our "Little Girly Trucks". I have never thought we would be that, but standing next to these big trucks, our truck almost looks like an offspring.

Our truck is the one furthest to the right in the front. Here are some more pictures of some of our friends with their trucks.





Well, we left Hutchinson yesterday and drove all the way to Thackerville, OK. It was 350 miles of mostly highway, but I was still tired by the time we got there. Today Bonnie & Gail, Gayle & Tom, and Dale & Mark will join us at the campground for a couple of days. We will be moving south again most likely on Tuesday morning.