December 16 to 27: Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas one and all!

We left for Seattle for Christmas a day earlier than we originally planned. Rather than get up at the crack of dawn and drive like crazy, we decided to stay at a hotel near the airport the night before -- the Quality Suites has a Park, Sleep, and Fly program so we got to leave our car at the hotel while we were gone.

The direct flight on Continental from Houston to Seattle went well (we were even fed a little!). We were met at the airport by one sister and brother-in-law (the ones that have been living in their motorhome for over ten years now). We stayed at the same hotel as that sister and celebrate at the other sister's house.

We performed many of the family rituals such as cookie-baking and pizza-eating night. Four kinds of cookies (chocolate chip, spritz, snickerdoodles, and a new one called boiled cookies). We usually make more varieties but chose to concentrate on our favorites and the one new one.

We met the newest member of the family: Snorky who is now the new ruler of the roost. But she is adorable and sits up and boxes (but she didn't get new boxing gloves for Christmas).

We performed many strange and wonderful rituals, even if we aren't so sure what we were doing or why we were doing it. In this particular ritual we appear to notice that the room has a ceiling!

We enjoyed the family's traditional Christmas dinner of spareribs, meatballs, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and all the trimmings. Let us not overlook the Jell-O salads which are an absolute requirement (two, one red, one green). Dessert was the cookies mentioned earlier, a delicious chocolate mint mousse cake, and pumpkin pie from Ron's tradition.

We opened our Christmas crackers, read the jokes, admired the prizes, and proudly wore the paper crowns. Here Ron contemplates whether meeting Joyce and joining her family for Christmas was really such a good idea!

Joyce tried self-portraiture while looking through the prism looking glass that was in one of the crackers.

And of course there were presents, lots and lots of presents! We are a Christmas Eve family so we got to open our gifts after our wonderful dinner. Christmas Day is a casual "Day after Christmas" event for us when we get together to enjoy each other's company and eat left overs.

December 7 to December 16: Livingston (our new hometown)

The drive to the Escapees RV Park in Livingston was a reasonable 220 miles. When we arrived we got the last spot (#5) in the park with electrical hook-ups! We moved the next day to #95, which we quite enjoy.



We have been enjoying the Christmas activities around town including the street fair and the evening parade. The parade was astounding for a small town -- it ran for over an hour!

Escapees is the RV club we belong to which provides our mail forwarding service and advice and many items through their website. Part of the advice is about how to become a Texan. We did that on December 12 (a date that will live in infamy). We left our site about 10 am and returned by about 3:30 with all our work done. The vehicles had been inspected; we had gotten the license plates; we had received our driver's licenses (including Joyce taking the exam and driving test for a special license because our motorhome is so heavy!). That even included time to drive to Lufkin to the Social Security office to get a document verifying Joyce's social security number as she didn't have her card with her.

Saturday we will put the RV in storage and head to Houston to fly to Seattle for Christmas.

December 3 to December 6: Arlington

Our next stop was in Arlington which is between Forth Worth and Dallas. It was a long driving day down from Amarillo (about 350 miles) but preferable to setting up and breaking down camp twice in quick succession.

It is a real shopping mecca (in other words we loved it!). We visited with friends including a woman from Colorado who was in desperate need of a kind of Tropicana Twister and a variety of canned peas that she used to buy in Colorado. As a form of charity work, we brought some to her.

We also visited the Sixth Floor Museum about the death of President Kennedy. And that same night we attended the Dallas Camera Club and saw an interesting use of a photo judge in Kansas who recorded his comments.