Partying and Projects During our Last Week of Resort Life

As the last days of our two month-long-resort-stay count down, we are finishing up lots of projects. The most important was hosting a big birthday party. Denisa's Mother started wintering at this 55+ park 35 years ago. If you do the math, you can see that she's turning 90 years old this spring. In 35 years here, she's made many life-long friends. Even though her birthday isn't until April, we decided to host a party here with her winter friends before we left the park.

We served cake and punch to close to 200 friends that stopped by to wish her a happy birthday that afternoon.

It will take her until her birthday in April to get all those birthday cards read!

The next day we helped to host another party. Many of our winter friends come from far northern states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. Those states have big crowds when they have get-togethers in our resort. But when talking to a friend from Nebraska, we realized that both our states had too few people in the park to party. So last year we invented the Oklahoma/Nebraska pot luck. We had a nice crowd for our second annual party, and we can confirm that the citizens from these two states are great cooks. They also have a good sense of humor in participating in our silly games and trivia contests.

In those final days, we also made time for another line dance party. We have the best teachers in the valley, and each month they invite other resorts to join us for three hours of continuous dancing. We had long lines of line dancers, with as many as 80 people on the floor.

We also had our last evening of serving ice cream at the club house.  Mark eats ice cream every day, so we are uniquely qualified to serve up this frozen treat.

Another last minute project is to pick fruit off Denisa's Mother's trees. The trees need to be stripped of fruit so they can put all their energy into the blooms that are forming next year's crop. We've been complaining about the sorry citrus harvest this year, so it took less time to pick the fruit this time. We also have seen some odd fruit this year, including this huge grapefruit. When we cut it open, we found that it had formed an unusual amount of rind around a tiny heart of citrus.

Two months ago, we made lists of things we were going to accomplish in all our spare time while we were off the road. That would include cleaning  the outside of the motor home. So of course we waited until the last week to get it done. First, Mark cleaned the top of the motor home roof.

Then Denisa finally showed up to help spread a coat of mop-and-glow wax to the white fiberglass top. After that first coat, Denisa climbed off the roof and somehow managed to get a drop of the cleaner inside her ear. She can report that it is a painful accident, and a very efficient way to be banned from ever helping with this project again.

So after two months of dancing and playing pickleball on a daily basis, we jammed even more parties and projects into our last week of resort life.