Busy, busy, busy ....

You might think that being down in Mission is all "Happy Hours" and relaxing, but you would be totally wrong. Well, we do have our happy hours most days and the weather is beautiful most days, but we do get work done.

I started unpacking our boxes about 1 1/2 weeks ago and thanks to our neighbor Linda, my nick-nack case and a lot of our pictures are hanging up. It will take a while until I take pictures of the coach house, since there is still a lot of work to be done. We decided to scan all our pictures from the albums on to a hard drive and that project is a "little" bit bigger than I thought.

Doug has been working on the truck, since we got the fenders last Monday. For a day or so it was just him and our neighbor Larry working on the first fender, but once they had things figured out I just had to get involved too.

Don't they look just beautiful!!!

This morning we brought the truck back to the shop to have the hitch installed and the truck bed shortened. So as you can see, we are actually very busy down here.

Castles in the Sand

Just because we are back in Mission does not mean that we are not doing things anymore. We needed a break from working on the truck and the coach house, so we went with Larry and Linda to South Padre Island to check out a sand castle building competition. The contest went from Thursday to Saturday and since the weather forecast was talking about rain Friday night, we decided to go on Friday, just in case all the sand castle were going to be washed away.

It was actually pretty cool to see the making of these statues.




The artwork was pretty impressive, even though it was not finished yet. I am glad we did not go on Saturday, since 250,000 people showed up to check this event out. I just don't like big crowds and having to hunt for a parking spot.

Instead we went for a nice lunch with Larry and Linda on Friday and arrived home before the thunderstorm started.

... and then came the call!!!

We had been back in Mission for a week when we got the call Thursday a week ago. Tru-Trac called at 12:35 pm to let us know that the truck was ready to be picked up. I was of course in the middle of making lunch, so we ate really quick, packed an overnight bag and got on the road. The trip was pretty uneventful other than the swarm of small butterflies by Alice and the thunderstorm north of Waco as we had 35 miles left to go. We arrived at Alvarado around 9 pm and turned in fairly soon, since we had to go another 500 miles the next day and on the way back we both had a vehicle to drive.

We picked up the truck on Friday morning and headed back down to Mission. We made good time through Austin and San Antonio and I actually got to drive the truck once we put in some fuel in Alice. It took a little bit of getting used to, but I actually drove 80 miles and even made it through a small town without any problems. It sure is a different view point sitting so high up in the truck. We got into Mission around 7 pm and now our lot is filled up with vehicles.

Here are some pictures from the inside of the truck.




Now I can start relaxing and get settled back in at our winter home. Doug has started working on the truck and next week we will have a new hitch installed so that we can put the Ford on the market. Once he is done with all his stuff, I will work on making the inside look all shiny. There is always a project to be done down here, so we surely will not get bored this winter.