Christmas In The Sonoran Desert

I must apologise to my loyal friends who follow this blog, for being so long between posts! Honestly I have a very good excuse...really, I do! It is all Glenis' fault. She decided that she wanted to try her hand at blogging....now as you know, Glenis is flipping brilliant in a lot of areas, but her knowledge of computer software makes me look like a genius. Anyway, to add to that learning curve and the stresses it brought into our lives, our bandwidth will only comfortably support one user at a time..hence if she's online, I am not. The result is worth the pain and the delay though. I highly recommend that you read what she has posted.

The weather leading up to Christmas was spectacular as you can see by this picture, taken on December 21st. Our sympathies were with our friends and family that were in the middle of a very snowy and cold weather system. Particularly with Stephie & Scott and the babies, as they ventured across the Coquihalla to spend Christmas with Ashley in Victoria...nobody should have to go out in that.

The weather here turned on Christmas day and the rain and wind came in...blew our brand new windsock right off of the pole! We experienced our first snow here at Boyce Thompson, on December 26th, and that night our water hose froze in the 27F temps. My dear friend, Lynne, who is wintering in Indio this year thought that was amusing and suggested that we should visit them in Palm Springs. She was not laughing quite as much when I skyped them the next night to tell them that I had noted on wunderground.com that they too had a forecasted temperature for that night of 27 F. In a sick kind of a way, I enjoyed that!

The brilliant blue Arizona skies and warm temperatures have now returned. The Christmas turkey leftovers have become something to dread and we turn our faces to a new year. We will be ushering in 2009 with our dear friend Nicki from Vancouver...BC snow not withstanding. Our fingers are crossed that all airports are open and running smoothly on Tuesday.

Happy New Year everyone!

Life In The RV On The Road

Our experiences as full time RVers have given us the opportunity to really get to know an amazing array of new people. The contact lists on our cell phones and email have expanded beyond the short list of friends and family that we had when we began in 2006.

We just completed our final Christmas cards and the addressees included Arizona, multiple cities in Oregon, Washington & California, British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba & Ontario. Next year that list will also include Maine, Missouri and Utah (at least). These are people that would never have crossed our paths outside of this lifestyle...and who have become close and dear friends, isn't it marvelous! We feel blessed to have this opportunity.

To support our full-time RV lifestyle, we try to coordinate volunteer assignments in the state or province that we are travelling to. The resident host programs vary in different places, but primarily it means that in exchange for a few hours of time contributed per day to the park, we are given the opportunity to live in the park, usually on a fully serviced site. Does it get better than that? Imagine the opportunity to call some of the most beautiful areas of the Canada and USA home!

Well, that is the background that I want to set for this blog. As we go along, I will try to share some of the ups and downs of this lifestyle that we have chosen.
Cheers.