Did we follow our plan to continue to travel?

Wow! It's been six months since the last blog post! It's amazing how easy it is to get out of the habit of writing blogs when we make life changes! Our plan was to have a sticks and bricks home base, but continue to travel. Did we follow that plan?

After spending several months getting our new place into shape, it was time to see if we could leave it behind. First, we enjoyed the Christmas holidays with family. It was a bit of a Christmas miracle to get everyone smiling and looking at the camera for our Christmas card picture this year.

The Christmas decorations were still up, when we locked up our house and headed south for the entire month of January. It turns out that was a great decision, as we missed some record-breaking cold weather in Kansas City during that month. Should we take the motor home on our trip south to the land of the palm trees?

With the higher price of diesel, we calculated that it would cost close to one thousand dollars to drive the motor home all the way to the tip of Texas and back. So we opted to rent a place for a month, and drive our pickup to the Rio Grande Valley.

We've gone to Bentsen Grove Resort many times, but this trip would be different. Denisa's 93-year-old mother bought a place and has wintered in the same lot in the same resort for 39 winters. But now that she can no longer drive in the fast traffic of South Texas, she decided to sell. So we spent much of our month in the winter warmth getting her mobile on the market. We placed an ad on the park's facebook group, and it sold the first day! 

Then work began boxing up 39 years of memories that we would take back with us in our pickup. It was definitely a "working vacation." But the weather was warm and we enjoyed day trips to places down south that we might never see again. We drove Denisa's mother to Rockport to visit friends and see the Gulf again.

Even though we will continue to travel, we have to say that we will miss the citrus trees in her yard with the bountiful harvest of tangerines each winter.

For many years, we've watched the progress of the construction of the border wall between the United States and Mexico. That wall runs just four miles south of the Bentsen Grove Resort. Construction has come to a halt since 2020, but we had to bike up to see it once again.

We were glad that our youngest son decided to fly down to spend a long weekend with us. He's been visiting south Texas since he was born, and he wanted to see it one more time as well.

Our trip to South Padre Beach included helping an older couple. They had driven too far into the loose sand on the beach and got stuck. But Blake and Mark managed to use all their muscles to get them out of their predicament.

We returned to our house at the end of January, glad to see that it did well in the cold weather while we were away. It looks like we can continue to travel during the winter even though we own a home. But some fun experiences don't require a long trip. After watching our home-town Kansas City Chiefs win their second Super Bowl in a row, we traveled downtown to welcome them home at the championship parade. It only took a 20-minute drive to Kansas City to join a million other people for the historic celebration. It was crowded and crazy. Instead of going to Union Station for the end of the parade, we opted to head home. It was on the short drive home that we got our first text asking about our safety as word hit national news about the shootings after the parade. We're thinking that we won't make the trip to such a crazy crowded event again.

But will we keep with the plan to continue to travel other places? A couple weeks after our return from the south, we headed north. We went on a family ski trip to Colorado.

Our granddaughter is in her second year of ski lessons. We snapped a cute picture of her and her parents on the way to ski school one morning.

Our grandson is too young for lessons. But he's not too young to hitch a ride on Grandude's skis.

We have enjoyed much time in the Rocky Mountains in the last nine years of travel. But arriving there slowly in the motor home has always allowed us to climatize to the high elevations on the way. We might spend a month traveling from the plains to the mountains, getting used to the increasing altitude very slowly. But this trip we drove from the Kansas City elevation of 900 feet, all the way up to an elevation of 9,000 feet in just one day. We have to say that is too fast for us. We had head aches and felt rotten during the entire trip. So even though we enjoyed a good day of skiing and good family fun sledding, we never felt good. Maybe we're too old to put our body through that kind of travel with such a dramatically sudden elevation change?

After traveling all of January and much of February, did we keep with our plan to continue to travel? We had some airline miles that had to be used or lost, so we booked another trip for March. But that's a topic for another blog. In the meantime, we're going to make a concerted effort to keep up with the blog. We have more updates and more travel adventures to share!