Time to Hit the Road
It’s January. “All” the Christmas decorations (all two of them) are in storage until next season. We’ve had wonderful times with friends and family this year, including a last camping weekend with eldest daughter and family that was rainy, but still great fun.
Some of the maintenance and upgrade items got done: we now have a bank of solar panels installed and just waiting for some sunshine to see how well they work. I sound proofed the A/C units on the inside for some improvement in sound level, and insulated them on the outside to hopefully improve how they work in the Texas sun in the summer (we’ll have to wait for 2018 to see how well that works!), and replaced the covers as they were starting to crack.
Our six month long diet program has shown really good results for both the DW and myself. We are entering into the final phases of that, having achieved our desired goal weights so we will be transitioning out of the weight loss phase to the maintenance phases. We have a renewed commitment to keep these weights in check now forever. No more yoyoing on the scales for us.
We’ve planned on going to the southwest (New Mexico and Arizona) for January and February, returning to Texas for spring break in March to camp with daughter and family while they are out of school. This is becoming an annual ritual which is great fun and gets us to places we haven’t been before and we look forward to it.
There is also the realization that we have thoroughly enjoyed the time we spend with family, and will seriously miss having our offspring and their offspring close by. We seem to be the happiest when we are with one or the other even though they are a thousand miles (literally) apart. So it is with mixed emotions that we are getting on the road. We want to go, and we’d like to stay as well.
From here, we will have a long trip to the far side of Arizona – Quartzsite specifically to meet up with a group who owns the same brand of motorhome we have and to attend the largest consummer RV show in the country. Both activities should be interesting to see and attend. We will only be about 10 miles from the California border, so maybe we’ll drive the RV over into the land of fruits and nuts just to put it on the map we keep on the side of the RV showing where we’ve been. That will take some thinking to decide if it’s worth it.
Looks like this year is going to see us cover a lot of ground. After Quartzsite and whatever else we do in February before heading “home”, we plan on spending the next several weeks in the midwest following spring break. We will be in Indiana for youngest daughter’s birthday, and her son’s birthday. We also plan on doing some interior upgrades to the RV to improve the seating which we will do in Indiana (much of the RV industry calls Indiana home and it’s a good place to shop for RV items) and generally be in that part of the country back and forth until mid-June.
Then we plan on heading out to Alaska. This has been on my “bucket list” seems like forever. I’ve always wanted to drive the AlCan highway and that is what we will be doing this summer and into early fall. There is no exact time schedule or itinerary worked out, so stay tuned here for more details as they unfold.
Quartzsite AZ
January 21, 2017
