Heading West This Winter

At Marathon RV Park, Marathon, Texas...

Well, good grief! I see it has been over a month since I posted anything. I have good reason, though. We spent the holidays with the kids and, as usual, headed out to our wintering location after grandson Pryce's birthday on January 3. I could post a bunch of photos of the family Christmas festivities, but that's sort of overdone, I think, in a lot of blogs. I will, however, post some pics of Sandy and me and the grandsons at a mini-celebration of Pryce's birthday. (He likes parties--especially his--and he will have others, for sure, after we leave.):

L to R: Pryce, Sandy, Me, Sutton and Mason

 You will also be forced to view a photo of newest grandson Sutton who, at eight months, is fairly stricken with his grandpa--or maybe it's the other way around, I'm not sure:

Now, isn't he adorable? (I'm talking about Sutton, not me.)

While we were in the Conroe area during the holidays, we had some time to get together with good friends and former fulltimers Dave and Janice on a couple of occasions; that's always a hoot. 

I also happened to notice, in reading his blog, that a fellow fulltimer and his wife were at the Escapees park in Livingston, so when Sandy and I went over there to pick up our mail, we made a point to stop and meet them. I even have a special link on this blog for fellow bloggers we've met in person. That's inevitably a lot of fun and interesting, since you feel you already know them.

We enjoyed meeting and visiting with Mark and Karen (above). He writes as Mark From Missouri, and his posts reveal an analytical mind like few others. I would like to be more of a planner and a thinker, rather than just winging it most of the time as I am prone to do. It's not that I can't do it; after all, it's sort of essential to analyze and plan when you're flying an airliner. I've just gotten lazy, I guess, in retirement.

So where are we going this winter? As I mentioned in the previous post, we will be in Arizona and California for most of the time. As you may recall from previous years, we usually go to the Rio Grande Valley, but we've never wintered out west, so we thought we should try it just once, anyway. 

Speaking of planning, I actually had to do way too much of that for this trip. Why? Because everybody over 55 living north of Oklahoma must be a snowbird. About a billion of them migrate every winter to exactly where we're going. I finally got reservations that will carry us into March, but I got tired of doing that and gave up. We have friends who just head out with no reservations and seem to do fine, and I guess we'll see how that works in March when we have no idea where we'll go. Oh, well, that will probably be fun, but if you don't hear from us for a while in March, look for buzzards circling, will you? 

So, you'll be seeing posts more often now as we make the long jaunt out west. Our first stop was to visit friends Richard and Karen, who recently moved into their new spot at the Lone Star Corral Escapees Co-op in Hondo. We stayed overnight and had good food and conversation at a local Mexican restaurant. They seem very happy with their new digs:

After saying our goodbyes, we headed west on U. S. 90 to our next stop--Marathon, Texas, near Big Bend National Park--for an overnight. We really despise one-night stops, but we've got to keep our schedule to get to our destination before the other snowbirds swarm in and take over our tree limb we have reserved there. 

We had never before driven this particular route westbound through Texas, and I usually rather enjoy seeing new territory. However, it seems that, no matter how you drive through west Texas, it is 1) ugly, 2) lonely, and 3) boring. If you're not on an Interstate highway, you may not see a car or a living soul for quite a while. You will, however, see plenty of border patrol vehicles, as U. S. 90 follows the U. S./Mexico border very closely. This was what we saw through the windshield for most of this lonely leg:

I thought, "This must be kinda what it was like heading west in a covered wagon." (Well, maybe not; I don't think they had roads like this.)

Okay, I've got us caught up now. Look for more frequent posts, as there's no telling what we'll find out here.

Thank you, Lord, for this wonderful life; 

please forgive me if I fail to appreciate it each day as I should.

We don't stop playing because we get old; we get old because we stop playing. 

 ---George Bernard Shaw

"I get up every morning, and I just don't let the old man in." ---Clint Eastwood