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!!