We spent Christmas with
Julie’s mom who is a resident at Blue Skies of Texas (formerly Air Force
Village) in San Antonio. Last Monday we attended a nice Christmas concert in
the main lobby of the facility. We also enjoyed Christmas cookies and some
glühwein during the concert.
Julie’s niece Rachel drove
down from Austin to San Antonio on Christmas Day. She joined us for the
delicious ham and scalloped potatoes dinner that Julie prepared. We hadn’t seen
Rachel in over a year and it was a nice visit.
We left Castroville the
day after Christmas and headed back to Kerrville. Our mobile RV repair
technician met us at the RV park around noon. He replaced the electronic
control board in our Aqua Hot and our heating system was fixed and finally
working right. I put our electric space heaters away that we used to stay warm
the past two weeks.
We left Kerrville on
Friday and headed west on I-10. We overnighted in Fort Stockton, then Las
Cruces, NM, and arrived in Tucson today for a four-night stay. We’re on our way
to Southern California to spend the winter on the West Coast this year.
Happy New Year!
Steve & Julie
Cornelius
After spending a week in
Kerrville, we headed up the road to Fredericksburg, Texas on Friday, December 6th.
Fredericksburg is a nice town of over 11,000 people and was settled by German
immigrants. It attracts many tourists, especially around Christmas and we
enjoyed seeing all the decorations.
Fredericksburg is the
birthplace of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. There’s an awesome National Museum
of the Pacific War in town.
We had to leave
Fredericksburg a few days earlier than planned because we had no heat in our
motorhome. We drove back to Kerrville and called a mobile RV technician who had
training and experience on our Aqua Hot hydronic (water-based) heating system.
The diesel burner would not ignite, so we did not have heat in our house.
The technician diagnosed
the problem as a defective electronic control board. I ordered and received one
so we’ll have it installed on December 26th when we go back to
Kerrville from Castroville where we’re currently at.
Julie and I have decided
to end our full-time RVing late next year. We’ve been at it since May 2013,
have visited all 50 states, and are ready to have a sticks and bricks home again. This year we have looked at 55+ communities near Hilton Head and Tucson.
We looked at model homes
at the new Latitude Margaritaville near Hilton Head and liked them. We also wanted to take a
look at the Latitude Margaritaville Daytona Beach community which opened in
2017. Last Tuesday, we flew from San Antonio to Orlando and rented a car to
drive up to Daytona Beach.
We have been doing a lot
of research on the various floor plans, options offered, and available lot
locations. On Wednesday we learned that the lots had different build dates. We
picked a lot where the house will be finished sometime between November and
January and we would be ready to close and move in then.
We picked out the
“Coconut” floor plan, about 1700 square foot, two bedrooms, two full baths, den, great room, and a large
outdoor living area with screened enclosure. We’ve already picked out our
exterior color scheme, a shade of green.
We have to fly back in
late-April for our appointment in the design center where we pick out our
cabinets, flooring, tile, interior paint colors, etc.
Steve & Julie
Cornelius
We left Tucson on Friday,
November 22nd, and headed for Texas (and Central Standard Time). We
did our usual overnight stops in Las Cruces, NM, Fort Stockton and Kerrville,
Texas before settling in at Alsatian RV Resort outside of Castroville. We spent
three days there visiting Julie’s mom in San Antonio. On Thanksgiving Eve, we
enjoyed cocktails and dinner at Blue Skies of Texas West (formerly Air Force
Village) with Julie and her mom’s long-time friends Buzz, Ellen and Peggi.
We brought Julie’s mom to
our motorhome on Thursday to enjoy the wonderful Thanksgiving meal Julie had
prepared. We watched one of our favorite Thanksgiving themed movies, “Planes,
Trains and Automobiles” from 1987, with Steve Martin and John Candy, before the
meal.
We headed back to
Kerrville and Buckhorn Lake RV Resort on Friday, November 29th. The RV resort
had put up beautiful Christmas decorations and lights.
Last Tuesday morning we
went in to Kerrville with our motorhome to have our chassis batteries tested
and diagnose a “check engine” light. While we were there, the RV repair shop
offered to install our new “house” batteries that I had bought and had shipped
to them a few weeks before. We had an appointment on the following Friday, but
they had the time to do it on that Tuesday while we were there.
While we were waiting at
the RV repair shop, I noticed a Unity class B van had pulled in to the shop for
service. Later I noticed an older gentleman who was browsing the RV supplies next
to where we were sitting. I asked him if the Unity van was his and he said yes.
We got to chatting and it turned out he was Ken, the author of Big Rig Best
Bets, a book we have used since 2013, when doing our trip planning.
Big Rigs Best Bets list
campgrounds through the country that can accommodate RVs that are 40-foot or
longer. Ken and his wife Ellie visit or stay at every campground listed in their
book and actually measure the campsite lengths. They published a new edition of
their book every December.
I had corresponded several
times by email with Ken after we bought our first Big Rig Best Bets book in
2013. Ken and Ellie recently sold their business after 18 years.
Last Friday we left
Kerrville and drove 30-miles up the road to Fredericksburg, Texas where we’ll
spend a week.
Steve & Julie
Cornelius
We’ve been busy, just
living here day-to-day in Tucson. We celebrated our 38th wedding
anniversary on October 23rd with a nice dinner at Vivace Restaurant
on the north edge of Tucson, next to the foothills. It was a beautiful, warm evening
so we sat outside.
We extended our 21-day
stay at the Davis Monthan AFB Family Campground for another few weeks on
November 3rd. The campground has slowly filled up with snowbirds who
are staying here for three to five months.
We have been hiking around
the old golf course across the street from the campground. The base closed the
golf course on May 1, 2018 due to increased operating expenses (watering costs)
and decreased use. Blanchard Golf Course had been open for 56 years. Base
personnel now use any of the 5 public golf courses in Tucson.
We stopped several times
by one of our favorite places in Tucson, Roma Imports. The small Italian
business serves lunch and dinner. They make many different home-made, and then frozen,
Italian entrees for sale. We like to pick up a few meals for the road as
they’re easy to prepare when we overnight somewhere.
Another place we like to
go to is Bisbee Breakfast Club. The original café is in Bisbee, Arizona but now
there are five other locations in Arizona, including Phoenix, Mesa and several
in Tucson. It’s a great place for breakfast or lunch.
This past Monday we
visited the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. It is about 20-miles away in the mountains
west of Tucson near the Saguaro National Park. It is a botanical garden, earth
sciences center, natural history museum, zoo, and art gallery. Our favorite
exhibit is the hummingbird aviary. We last visited in March 2015 and saw a tiny
little hummingbird nest with babies.
We leave Tucson on Friday
and head towards Texas.
Steve & Julie
Cornelius
We left Albuquerque last Sunday,
October 13th, and overnighted in Las Cruces. On Monday we drove to
Tucson to Davis Monthan Air Force Base to spend five weeks at their Family
Campground. They don’t take reservations, but we had called ahead and were told
that there were plenty of camp sites open.
The campground seemed
about half full when we got here, but snow birds have been steadily rolling in
all week. We could only register for 21-days and have to check back at the
office on our 21st day to see if we can extend our stay. We're allowed to extend in our site, provided no one is waiting in overflow (with no hookups).
If anyone is waiting in overflow, we have to leave our site and move to
overflow. Then we could rotate back to a hookup site when the next camper
reached their 21st day.
On Thursday I saw in my
newsfeed that the Union Pacific historic Big Boy steam locomotive No. 4014 Big
Boy was in Tucson. It is touring the Union Pacific system throughout 2019 to
commemorate the transcontinental railroad’s 150th anniversary. 25 Big
Boy locomotives were built between 1941 and 1944. Of the 25 built, only eight survived
and are on static display at museums across the country. One of them, No. 4014,
was re-acquired by Union Pacific and restored to operating condition over
two-years for the 2019 tour. It is currently the largest, heaviest, and most
powerful operational steam locomotive in the world.
The Big Boy Tour is on its
way through New Mexico to Texas with stops in El Paso, San Antonio, Houston, and
Marshall. Then it stops in Little Rock and Kansas City, on its way home to
Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Steve & Julie
Cornelius
We left Las Vegas on
Sunday, October 6th and headed south. We stopped at a new Pilot station
on U.S. Highway 93 between Las Vegas and Kingman, AZ to fuel up. It was so much
easier than trying to refuel at the TA truck stop in Kingman. As we neared
Kingman, the traffic was backed up over 2-miles in the left lane of U.S.93, as
everyone was trying to turn left onto I-40 to head east.
We went to Williams and
the Grand Canyon Railroad RV park where we met up with Mike and Marcia again. I
was pleasantly surprised that the local CBS station was showing the Denver
Broncos-Los Angeles Chargers football game. Usually only the Arizona Cardinals
games are shown in Arizona on the CBS stations.
Last Monday we only drove
about 75-miles to Meteor Crater RV Park. We intentionally planned a short day
so we could drive into nearby Winslow, Arizona. We enjoyed standing on the
corner, seeing the flat-bed Ford, and the statues of Jackson Browne and Glenn
Frey who wrote the Eagles hit “Take it Easy”.
We went to the La Posada
Hotel next for dinner, a former Harvey House on the Santa Fe railroad. The
hotel seemed very busy for a Monday night. We enjoyed a cocktail in the hotel
bar while we waited for our dinner reservation. It was Mike and Marcia’s first
visit to the La Posada and they thoroughly enjoyed their dinner and watching
all the train traffic out the dining room windows.
We drove about 265-miles
on Tuesday to Rio Puerco, New Mexico, just west of Albuquerque, where we spent
the night at the Route 66 RV Resort. It was our first stay at this RV resort.
The nearby casino was within walking distance of the RV resort, but they had a
shuttle. When we checked in the RV resort, the clerk gave us cards to join the
casino player’s club.
We went to the casino for
dinner but hadn’t decided where to eat among the several available restaurants.
When we got inside the casino, there were lots of people lined up at the
buffet. We learned that with a player’s club card, the buffet was 2-for-1 on
Tuesdays and it was only priced at $14.95. Mike and I quickly got our player’s
cards, with a pre-loaded complimentary $5.00, and our coupon for the buffet
2-for-1.
The buffet was actually
very good with several food stations offering Latin, Asian, Italian, American
classics, Mongolian BBQ, and a bakery with desserts. After dinner, I used my
player’s card, pre-loaded with the $5, on a Walking Dead slot machine and won
$55.
On Wednesday, we drove to the
Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta Park, where we had reservations in the VIP East RV lot
and met our friends Kris and Jan. We made our reservations for the balloon
fiesta a year ago on the opening day of ticket sales. It sold out in 2-3 minutes.
Julie and I have been to
the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta four times before (2008, 2009,
2010 and 2013) and had always stayed in the VIP West RV lot. We had an end view
of the balloon launch field, but in the VIP East RV lot, we had a horizontal
view of the entire field. It was much, much better.
Our four-night stay at the
balloon fiesta was fun. We “dry” camped (no utilities) for the four nights, but
we could run our generator during the day to charge up our motorhome batteries.
We thoroughly enjoyed the
balloon fiesta this year with its 550 hot air balloons. There were several
special shape balloons that we hadn’t seen before. On Friday night, we saw sky
divers above us in the dark and they used white flares and fireworks to show
their location before landing on the balloon field.
We left Albuquerque on
Sunday, October 13th, and drove south to Las Cruces for an overnight
stay. Today we arrived in Tucson for a five-week stay to just hang out and
enjoy the warm fall weather.
Steve & Julie
Cornelius
