Flamingo on a Stick

Hope today has been a good one for everyone. We had a great time Saturday night celebrating John's birthday (it is really on Monday). We invited family and friends over for brats on the grill. It was great to see my brother Larry and my nephew Jordan and his wife Rachel. Jordan and Rachel are expecting their first child (a boy) in September. My friend Brenda (actually my sister-in law's sister -in-law) and husband Rick stopped by. Brenda is the one I came back early to work for.  Best friend Trudy and her family (Mike, Eric and Matthew) were also there. Lastly but by no means least my boys, Gabe and Mitch!  We have had a little time with Gabe since we returned but this was our first visit Mitch. It is so good to see him. He only has a month until he is done with school in Decorah. We are headed up there early May so we can be there for graduation. He looks good but a little exhausted. He has another phone interview for a job this week too. Finishing college and finding a jo...

A happy goalie at the end of a great win. Go Brady! Do blondes really have more fun? Wednesday night we got to see our first Roughrider Hockey game of the season and its playoff time. This team has already won the regular season title and are favored in the tournament. However, it is difficult to win both the season and the tournament so it won’t be an easy task. They had a bye first round and 11 days off, sometimes that is good and sometimes it hurts. The first period it didn’t look good but by second period they had their game legs and things turned around. They won 4-1. Brady was great in goal all game and kept them in it first period until the team got on track offensively. It was a joy to get to see him play, he is an amazing goalie. The team all dyed their hair blonde for playoffs (a crazy tradition for playoffs) so our favorite redhead now sports a blonde ‘doo. We also connected with many friends from our hockey parent days, it was great. Afterwards we took Brady out for...

Morgan Creek County Park Well, we arrived in Iowa Saturday afternoon. It was a long drive from Kansas City but a nice one. The weather in Iowa is awful, rain and cold, they actually had snow Saturday morning but luckily we hadn’t arrived yet. We came back to Morgan Creek, one of the 2 Linn county parks that we stayed in most of last summer. When we pulled in I felt like we had never left. Was it all a dream? We were surprised at how many rigs were in the park , when the weather was so dreadful. We chose a site next to the shower house knowing we would be using it until out water heater is repaired.  A cold rainy cookout Not long after we were set up my friend Trudy arrived to welcome us home. Even though I had a chance to spend some time with her in Santa Fe NM, it is always good to see her. It wasn’t long after Trudy left that Gabe (oldest son) and his girlfriend Melissa arrived. This was our first chance to meet Melissa as they started dating after we left Iowa. She is a ...

Yesterday the dealer we were working with told us the part would be in by noon today so we stayed the night in Wichita and took our time getting up this morning. We even worked out and took showers in the campground showers (which were quite nice). Joh called at noon, no it hadn't arrived and usually they don't get their delivery until about 2, that's interesting, not what we were told yesterday. Waited until just before 2 and drove to the dealer. Part still hadn't arrived so we waited, and waited and waited. At 3:30 I told John I wasn't waiting any longer and we would just get it fixed back in Iowa, we can shower at the campgrounds until then. When we went to tell them we were leaving he said they had already gotten their Fed Ex earlier and everything else was there except this part but he was going to call Fed Ex and see if they just forgot a package. You think he could have done that a lot earlier, like as soon as he realized it wasn't with the other parts so...

Sunset at El Dorado State park, El Dorado KS In the middle of our Fort Supply stay our water heater quit working. John thought it was the circuit card but wasn’t sure. We talked with Excel and then Atwood who made the heater and it is still under warranty. They suggested a dealer just outside of Wichita KS on our way, Flint Hills RV in Andover. Made a 1pm appointment on Monday. This meant we needed to be on the road around 8 am.  Whooa........we are not morning people anymore?!! Well it couldn’t be avoided we had to set the alarm clock -yuck. We did get up and off in record time. Three plus hours later we arrived. The drive was nice and we enjoyed the Kansas countryside, looking more like our familiar midwest.  Our site in Big Oak We hung around until about 2 and they decided it was the circuit board that John thought was the culprit, first they didn’t think they had one but after a little more investigation they found one and even called and got all the warranty issu...

Remember the musical Oklahoma? Well this line from the song Oklahoma is a great description of our time here in Fort Supply, Oklahoma. We have had wind at least a portion of every day we have been here. One of the first days it was sustained winds of about 35mph with gusts to 50 and it sounds like that is how we will end our time here as that is the forcast for today, and tomorrow we head out again. Our site What have we done while we are here? We have taken long walks, worked out daily, read, and I have worked on my cross stitch. We haven’t even moved the truck since we have been here (got here on Tuesday). We could have used a trip to the grocery store but decided to use up what we have instead. Even though the refrigerator is looking bare there is probably enough in the cupboards and freezer that we could eat for a couple weeks yet. The plan is to go to Wichita to get the water heater fixed (appointment at 1 tomorrow) then drive and find a Walmart for the night somewhere on I-3...

I really didn’t talk to much about Amarillo. The weather was crazy. First we had hot  and very windy weather. Then even more wind and then a cold front. There was ice on the windows in the morning. We were only there for a couple days and under the circumstances didn’t do much. We did go to the Amarillo Botanical center, I just wanted to see something blooming. It is not a big center but I did get to take some photos of flowers particularly in their tropical greenhouse. It is along the river so we also took a short walk along the river. Lots of folks were out enjoying the unusually hot day (this was before things changed).  The other site we took in was the historic Route 66 area. We didn’t want to eat out but there were several places that looked interesting and smelled great. Several seemed to be big biker bars. John had fun checking out all the Harleys. This also is an area of lots of antique stores. I had fun browsing but I think my antiquing days are over. This place o...

Well, we are still around but haven't had internet for a few days. We hit our 5G limit early, thanks to an update from Apple that took about 1G. It reset today so we are back on but in a park where our reception is really slow. I'll probably wait until we have better reception to publish anything significant, with photos etc. We are at Fort Supply COE park for now. The government shutdown is affecting National Parks so we wonder if it it will shut down the COE parks too. We haven't had any knocks on the door asking us to leave yet so time will tell. We plan on leaving Monday, our hot water heater isn't working so Atwood is sending us to a dealer in Wichita to have it fixed. We are headed home a little faster than planned. A very good friend (kind-of-family) needs a sub in the dental hygiene clinic so she can get to a job interview. They are moving to near Ames and she has an interview for a full time teaching position at another dental hygiene program close to there. It...

The Petroglyph National Monument is not very far from where we were so Thursday we headed there to hike and checkout the petroglyphs. We have been to several locations with petroglyphs and they are always fascinating. This park has several areas with many petroglyphs and the hikes are relatively easy. Also we have a National Parks Pass and we are looking for things to do that have little or no cost. Just paid taxes, so need to refresh the coffers. There is some debate about what the petroglyphs mean: were they art work, communication, religious? John’s theory is that the petroglyphs were drawn by ancient teenagers engaging in a form of graffiti. He based this on the fact that several of the men and animals drawn had a penis, sometimes a very large penis and as we know teenage boys love to draw a penis (or breasts) on just about anything, giggling all the while. If you are the parent of boys you should know this. In middle school I found Gabe and his buddies while frosting Christmas co...

Wednesday morning I drove back to Albuquerque to find John had done the laundry for me, yeah!!! It was time for us to do something here. We needed to go to the store for fruits and veggies so we combined a trip to the Whole Foods market and a trip to Old Town for a little browsing and lunch. Before that we needed to make a quick trip to Camping World. It is not far from the RV park. This Camping World has a large RV sales showroom so we decided to look a little. We wouldn’t change for another rig but looking is always fun. They had a Grand Junction 5th Wheel. A friend of ours, Dan, has considered one of these so we checked it out. It was a 36 footer with a nice floor plan and great amenities. It was nice but I think our Excel is a better built rig. We also went through a Tuscany Class A that was on sale for only $239,000 (way out of our price range). It was a beautiful rig and probably had the most open floor plan I have ever seen in a class A. It had lots of extras like a tile floor...