Greetings! We have just spent a great weekend in Arlington, catching up with friends and family here. We had lunch with our former next-door neighbor, Judy, who has sold her house and is headed to California with her husband to start their new adventure. A huge step, but very well thought out and something they have thought about for a long time. Then we had dinner with Gary and Carole, our long time-friends and neighbors since we were all singles at the First United Methodist Church in Fort Worth. We went for a short ride after dinner, and I took a picture of the new Cowboys Stadium. It was dark and the car was moving, so please forgive the fuzziness; it is a SPECTACULAR stucture and it was alight due to high school playoff games being played there this weekend.
Sunday found us camping out with Dean's daughter, Deana, and her family. We cooked Chex Mix and cooked dinner together and just had a great time catching up. They have a new family member, a rottweiler named "Lucky", who was enamored with Molly and just the cutest BIG puppy you have ever met. I'm guessing he is at least 40 lbs, but his paws are about 4 inches across. I'm hoping his puppy personality persists, as he is absolutely precious and not the least agressive. I have to give equal time to the cat, Meow-Meow, who puts up with the obnoxious puppy and was actually glad to see Molly (who is greatly itimidated by cats).
Tomorrow, we head to Georgetown to look at homes, both new and used, to see what is available in this community that we have chosen for our retirement. It is centrally located amongst my family and has an active senior community, so we are anxious to see if we can make it a home. Stay tuned as we pursue this opportunity.
Have a great week, and we will catch up with you next weekend!
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Leaving Lake of the Ozarks
Welcome back to our blog. We've spent the summer at our home at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, building, painting, landscaping and basically working our fingers to the bone. The place looks great, however, so it was worth it!
Now we take off in the motorhome for South Texas, where we will spend the next 4 1/2 months at "Senior Camp" in the Rio Grande Valley. First, we will visit with family in Arlington, San Antonio and Bandera and we will go on a house-hunting trip in Georgetown (just north of Austin). Keep your fingers crossed, and we will keep you updated on our progress.
But for now, enjoy our morning view of the lake. The weather has been beautiful and unusually warm. Hope to see many of you very soon!
Now we take off in the motorhome for South Texas, where we will spend the next 4 1/2 months at "Senior Camp" in the Rio Grande Valley. First, we will visit with family in Arlington, San Antonio and Bandera and we will go on a house-hunting trip in Georgetown (just north of Austin). Keep your fingers crossed, and we will keep you updated on our progress.
But for now, enjoy our morning view of the lake. The weather has been beautiful and unusually warm. Hope to see many of you very soon!
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Greetings from warm South Texas
Hello! It is so hard to update this blog, as we aren't doing anything particularly special, but are truly enjoying the weather and the new friends we have made. This week, our pictures demonstrate 3 events and I will go backwards, as that is how I have filed the attached pictures.
The big event here is the hopefully weekly trip to dance at Pepe's on the River. This is a really fun place and on Sunday, there was a band there called Jealous Heart who has a wonderful fiddle/violin player and we really enjoyed ourselves. The pictures of our friends, for the most part, came from that event at Pepes.
We also went to South Padre Island today and stopped at Port Isabel for lunch at Pirates Landing on the way in. We took some great pics of parrots (that bark like a dog), but I fell in love with the golden retriever, named Buster. Lunch was pretty good, then we went to a "Market Days" affair at the convention center on South Padre. Hurricane Dolly hit this area this year and many places were under reconstruction or even closed as a result. Just reminds you how powerful these storms can be.
We also went back to the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge where we went last year, but this year it is dryer and the birds were nowhere to be found. We got to take the tram tour this year, but no wildlife was found and the place was a real disappointment.
What is working (a little too well) is that we have found all the best eateries around. We go from cinnamon rolls at Coby's Bakery to stuffed baked potatos (with barbecue) at Willies, to breakfast tacos at Cafe Bogabillias (breakfast for both of us totals $6). The largely Hispanic population here caters to the seniors and feeds us for peanuts so there in, lies the challenge! The good news is that they practically give you oranges, grapefruit, pineapple and other valley fruits for free. Only one more month to go, so we are hoping to maintain our weight and not gain by dancing it all off!!!
We will close for now - hope you all are staying warm!
The big event here is the hopefully weekly trip to dance at Pepe's on the River. This is a really fun place and on Sunday, there was a band there called Jealous Heart who has a wonderful fiddle/violin player and we really enjoyed ourselves. The pictures of our friends, for the most part, came from that event at Pepes.
We also went to South Padre Island today and stopped at Port Isabel for lunch at Pirates Landing on the way in. We took some great pics of parrots (that bark like a dog), but I fell in love with the golden retriever, named Buster. Lunch was pretty good, then we went to a "Market Days" affair at the convention center on South Padre. Hurricane Dolly hit this area this year and many places were under reconstruction or even closed as a result. Just reminds you how powerful these storms can be.
We also went back to the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge where we went last year, but this year it is dryer and the birds were nowhere to be found. We got to take the tram tour this year, but no wildlife was found and the place was a real disappointment.
What is working (a little too well) is that we have found all the best eateries around. We go from cinnamon rolls at Coby's Bakery to stuffed baked potatos (with barbecue) at Willies, to breakfast tacos at Cafe Bogabillias (breakfast for both of us totals $6). The largely Hispanic population here caters to the seniors and feeds us for peanuts so there in, lies the challenge! The good news is that they practically give you oranges, grapefruit, pineapple and other valley fruits for free. Only one more month to go, so we are hoping to maintain our weight and not gain by dancing it all off!!!
We will close for now - hope you all are staying warm!
Monday, January 19, 2009
Update from the Rio Grande Valley
We have settled in Donna, TX near McAllen, down in the tip of Texas. The park is called Bit-O-Heaven and has about 1,000 parking spaces, many of which are filled with permanent structures like mobile homes or park models. We have met a lot of people and have a group of people with whom we dance on Fridays, another we go to potlucks on Mondays and a core group in our neighborhood where we venture out to restaurants and field trips (and join for happy hour). This evening, we went to Willie's, a local joint which features loaded baked potatos (topped with barbecue) for $5.95 on Monday nights. Dean and I split one which was more than either of us usually eat!
Last week, we went to Progreso, Mexico (about 15 minutes away) and had lunch and did a little shopping. It seems a little more scary than last year, as the Mexican Army is certainly making a more dominant statement than they have before. We will probably go back, but may make that a less frequent trip this year.
For now, we will attach a few pictures and hopefully provide some juicy stories next week.
Last week, we went to Progreso, Mexico (about 15 minutes away) and had lunch and did a little shopping. It seems a little more scary than last year, as the Mexican Army is certainly making a more dominant statement than they have before. We will probably go back, but may make that a less frequent trip this year.
For now, we will attach a few pictures and hopefully provide some juicy stories next week.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
We have moved South for the Winter -
We are very far behind in providing an update to our blog, but now things have slowed down a bit so we will try to catch up. We left our lake home in Missouri in mid-November after a busy fall. We refinished the decks, caught up on yard work and pushed two RV-repair places to complete the much-needed work on the motorhome so we could get to San Antonio by Thanksgiving. Bottom-line is that the second one let us pick up the motorhome on Saturday before Thanksgiving and we were in Dallas-FW by Monday evening. We packed hastily, but managed to get just about everything we needed.
Thanksgiving was a wonderful event as usual, except that my son and his family weren't able to join us. They chose to go to Fort Leonard Wood to visit our grandson, Cody, who was close to completing MP school there. We did drive back up there two weeks later for his graduation.
The week after Thanksgiving, we squeezed in a cruise from Fort Lauderdale to the Virgin Islands meeting a few of our friends from Chicago. It was a lot of fun and a great break from the chilly weather we had encountered during November.
We spent Christmas and New Years in Bandera, which is about 40 miles west of San Antonio in Hill Country. My parents invited us for Christmas Eve church services and a collaborative lunch (Beef Wellington!) which we have enjoyed for the second year in a row. For New Years, we joined with my brother and sister-in-law attending a party with their best friends and neighbors, Mike and Jennifer. It was a fun, kind of laid-back evening with the guys hanging out by the fire outside and the girls watching Mama Mia! and singing and dancing along with the music. For the record, the party-goers ranged from 20-somethings to 60-somethings, all enjoying each others' company. I'm going to attach some pictures of Bandera, just to give you a feel for this wonderful little town which claims to be "Cowboy Capital".
We said "adieu" or should we say "adios" in early January and headed for the Rio Grande Valley, home of the Winter Texans from mostly the Midwest and Canada. We are staying in a different park this year, called Bit-O-Heaven (I keep calling it Bit of Honey) which has almost 1,000 RV spots. We landed in a friendly neighborhood in the back forty, surrounded by folks from Ohio, Kansas and Missouri. They scooped us up and started including us in their activities from the day we arrived, so we have been very happy with our selection. We might even plan a longer trip next winter, as these folks seem to be planted for at least 4 months every year.
We'll close for now, but will follow up soon with pictures and stories of our travels in the RGV (Rio Grande Valley).
Thanksgiving was a wonderful event as usual, except that my son and his family weren't able to join us. They chose to go to Fort Leonard Wood to visit our grandson, Cody, who was close to completing MP school there. We did drive back up there two weeks later for his graduation.
The week after Thanksgiving, we squeezed in a cruise from Fort Lauderdale to the Virgin Islands meeting a few of our friends from Chicago. It was a lot of fun and a great break from the chilly weather we had encountered during November.
We spent Christmas and New Years in Bandera, which is about 40 miles west of San Antonio in Hill Country. My parents invited us for Christmas Eve church services and a collaborative lunch (Beef Wellington!) which we have enjoyed for the second year in a row. For New Years, we joined with my brother and sister-in-law attending a party with their best friends and neighbors, Mike and Jennifer. It was a fun, kind of laid-back evening with the guys hanging out by the fire outside and the girls watching Mama Mia! and singing and dancing along with the music. For the record, the party-goers ranged from 20-somethings to 60-somethings, all enjoying each others' company. I'm going to attach some pictures of Bandera, just to give you a feel for this wonderful little town which claims to be "Cowboy Capital".
We said "adieu" or should we say "adios" in early January and headed for the Rio Grande Valley, home of the Winter Texans from mostly the Midwest and Canada. We are staying in a different park this year, called Bit-O-Heaven (I keep calling it Bit of Honey) which has almost 1,000 RV spots. We landed in a friendly neighborhood in the back forty, surrounded by folks from Ohio, Kansas and Missouri. They scooped us up and started including us in their activities from the day we arrived, so we have been very happy with our selection. We might even plan a longer trip next winter, as these folks seem to be planted for at least 4 months every year.
We'll close for now, but will follow up soon with pictures and stories of our travels in the RGV (Rio Grande Valley).
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