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).