Getting Ready To Get Set ...

Here we are on the downside of Christmas and working on starting a new decade. We had a fun last week having Brian, Nicky, Alyssa, and Emily visiting from New Jersey and spending some fun times with them and the Maine Evringhams. We ate too much, laughed a lot, and just generally enjoyed the holiday. It’s always fun seeing our three great kids and all the grandkids enjoying each other’s company. We were fortunate having Bailey make it home for a few days but we missed having Kyla around. She had to suffer by visiting the beaches of Hawaii.

Peggy and I have started getting the house back in post Christmas condition. The tree and all its trimmings are back in the attic and the remaining decorations will be working their way there in the next few days. 

So now it’s time to shift focus to getting Winne and us ready for travel. The weather has been fairly decent these past few days so I took advantage and removed Winne from storage and brought her home for pre-trip preparations and loading. Fortunately she awoke from her summer/fall nap with no complaints.

Peggy has a couple of appointments to take care of over the next week before our planned leave date on Tuesday January 7th ... leaving us with 8 days and a-wake-up to complete all the things on our pre-trip to-do list.

The plan for this trip is mostly standard ... we leave and head south towards the Gulf of Mexico as quickly as reasonable ... we rest up ... and then we continue our adventure. This year we intend to turn west after resting up in Alabama and follow I-10 generally to Arizona. As is usual for us ... the trip home is unplanned except for the return date of around April 1st.

This will be our first trip towing our Chevy Colorado ... so that will be different. We are also going to try a slightly different initial travel routine this time. The last several years we have endured a really long first day of travel - about 500 miles to central Pennsylvania and about the nearest open RV Park along our route. This time we are going to break that initial trek into two travel days by staying overnight about half way ... at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. This will require us to “dry camp” for one night using our on-board resources for water, heat, and electricity. We have stayed overnight there several times in the past with no issues ... it will just be a bunch colder this time. No worries ... we’ll have plenty of heat using our generator for electric heat in addition to our propane heat.

So that’s the plan ... stay tuned to see how it all works out!

Getting Ready For Santa

Mid- December already! My how time flies. It seems like we just finished Thanksgiving Dinner ... well I suppose we did since it hasn’t been that long since I had the last of the turkey in a sandwich. We had a fun Thanksgiving with all the Maine Gang over for Food, Family, and Football. 

The Maine Gang also got together for a fun night of “G” League Professional Basketball last week when we all headed to Portland to watch the Maine Red Claws take on the Delaware Blue Coats. Sounds a bit revolutionary now doesn’t it? The Red Claws are owned by the Boston Celtics and is sort of their “development” team ... so we got to see some of their young talent that sometimes play with the Big Team. Even the young ones (Taylor, Sophie, and Aiden) seemed to enjoy themselves — although it was waay past bedtime!

I did get my motorcycle pieces and my Chevelle hood over to Glen the Paint Man a few weeks ago and then he performed his magic. We managed to reinstall the hood on the Chevelle where it will sit in storage until spring ... and I went ahead and re-installed the motorcycle pieces as well. The “Big Bear” is all dressed up in her new paint awaiting re-emergence from hibernation in the spring!!

With Peggy doing most of the work ... we managed to get our Christmas tree up and the other Christmas decorations in the traditional spots. We are now ready for whatever Santa has in mind. One of our big presents this year will be a visit from the New Jersey Gang who will be joining us later this week for a few days of visiting. It’s always great to see them and catching up with all that’s going on in their lives.

We may actually have some snow on the ground while they are here. We had a few inches of snow until the big rain event a couple of days ago and now it is all gone! But no worries ... I see that more is on the way over the next week or so ... I’m fairly certain we will have a white Christmas.

So ... we have a busy several days ahead of us getting ready for our visitors and last minute Christmas preparations ... then a busy week of visiting ... then a busy week of trip preparations and then ... we are hitting the road once again ... destination somewhere warmer!

22 and-a-wake-up!