Yesterday, relatives from all over the western United States descended on Avon, Colorado for Terry’s son’s wedding today. In the early afternoon we drove to Avon, which is sort of a bedroom community to Vail, to get together with everybody at her son Cody’s house.

We had not seen Cody and Jonna’s place before, and it was pretty impressive. Located high on a hillside overlooking the valley, they have a great view, but I really wouldn’t want to drive down the steep roads they have to navigate in the wintertime.

Terry’s mom and dad, and her sister Dani had arrived from Arizona just a few minutes ahead of us, and her son Shawn pulled in from New Mexico an hour or so later.  Then we all headed to a Mexican restaurant for a family dinner. The kids’ father, Larry Wyse,  and his significant other, Jane,  were in from Wyoming and met us there, as did the bridal couple, Casey and Leslie, pictured below.

Here is a picture of (left to right), Shawn, Leslie, Casey, Cody, and Cody’s wife Jonna. If Casey and Cody look very much alike, it’s because they are identical twins. Terry and I have been married over thirteen years, and I still can’t tell them apart. I think they should wear name tags like RVers do. It would sure make my life easer! (Yes, it really is all about me!)

And here is one the waiter took of our dinner party. That’s your truly on the left, then Terry’s dad, Pete Weber, Shawn, and then from the far back right we have Cody, Jonna, Casey, Leslie, Shawn’s date, Faith, Terry’s mom, Bess Weber, Miss Terry, and her sister Dani.  The young man in the dark shirt and head brace next to Shawn is Casey and Cody’s friend, Bob. He broke his back in a bicycle accident just two weeks ago and is in a body brace and looks pretty rough, but there was no way he was going to miss the nuptials. You can just barely see Larry’s cowboy hat behind Bob, and Jane was hiding someplace.

This area is very pretty, but I have to tell you, it’s just not for me. Too many people crammed into too little space, and every inch of that space is very expensive. Cody told us that a small run of the mill two bedroom, one bath apartment, goes for $1600 a month, plus utilities, on a year lease minimum, in this slow economy. When things are booming, the same apartment will cost upwards of $2,000 a month. It is not uncommon for as many as four to six people to share a small apartment, all of them working two or three low paying jobs just to make ends meet. All so they can live in this natural outdoors playground.

Cody pointed out what he called “get away homes,” perched on the mountainside, owned by wealthy out of town people who come here to ski in the winter and mountain bike in the summer, and said the lowest priced house costs over $2 million. Since Cody is the accountant for one of the major development companies in the region, he knows what the current values are at any given time.  A lot of sports and Hollywood celebrities have homes in Vail and Avon, and enjoy coming here to rub shoulders with the ”little people.”

Don’t get me wrong, the area is beautiful, but I wouldn’t trade our life on the open road for the fanciest, most expensive house here. Our motorhome may not have as much square footage, but we can turn the key and go wherever we want, whenever we want.

Today we’ll get those two young people hitched, and spend some more time doing the family thing, and then things will get back to normal and we’ll get back to real life.

Thought For The Day – A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.

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How do you travel? Do you make a beeline for your destination by the quickest possible route, or do you casually meander along until you get there? Do you plan your stops ahead of time so you know where you’ll be every night, or do you worry about where you’ll spend the night when you get tired of driving for the day? Do you go from membership park to membership park, getting the most out of your annual dues?

Are you a planner who gets almost as much enjoyment in anticipation of your journeys, or do you like to be surprised by what you find along the way?

It’s only February, but we are already thinking about our summer travels. With a great big old country out there to explore, it’s hard to decide where to go next.

For several years our summer travels were dictated by our teaching schedule with Life on Wheels. We traveled a lot of miles, but it was always to the same places, and usually along the same routes. While I love teaching, the same old routine had stopped being fun. We’re ready to do something different.

Our Winnebago gives us the ability to travel some routes that we were not comfortable tackling in our bus conversion, and there are a lot of places in the Rocky Mountain west that we’d like to explore. So we may spend some time in Colorado and Wyoming. I’ve never been to Yellowstone and some of the other western National Parks.

Or we may go to the Pacific Northwest. We love the Oregon and Washington coast, and we haven’t been there in a long time. Then again, we really want to go to the big Winnebago Grand National Rally in Forest City, Iowa in July, so that would cut short a trip to the Northwest. Hmmm…. Branson? We haven’t been there in a long time. Our options are open, and our schedule is set in Jello. That’s the way we like it.

Our favorite mode of travel is to have some general idea of where we’re going, but no concrete plans on where or when we’ll be at any given time. We seldom make advance reservations, unless we’re going to be in a high traffic area where it might be hard to get a campsite otherwise.

I do a lot of internet research on areas where we’ll be traveling, and put together a list of places we’d like to see. We also get a lot of tips from our readers, and whenever we cross a state line, we try to stop at the State Welcome Center and pick up tourism brochures to give us more ideas.

When we’re going from Point A to Point B, we don’t stop in RV parks every night. I can’t see paying somebody $20 to $30 or more just for a place to park overnight. That’s why we have a self-contained RV. Between WalMarts, truck stops, city parks that allow free camping, casinos, Elks and Moose lodges, and VFW posts, we can always find a place to stop for the night. A few times we have taken readers up on their offer to park in their driveway for a night or two. If we do stop overnight at an RV park, it is usually a Passport America campground.

Once we arrive at a place where we want to spend a few days, we find a comfortable campground to settle into, and make day trips in a 75 to 100 mile radius to explore the region, in our van.

That’s the method that seems to work for us, but there is no one right way to live the RV lifestyle. It’s all abut what works best for you. So, how do you travel?

Thought For The Day – Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.

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Terry said we surprised the folks at Tra-Tel RV Park when we pulled out yesterday. Our site was pretty tight, and we had to back out and swing around to get out, and then swing back around a large rock to get out. Apparently most people need to jockey their RVs around a bit to get out of the park, but with Miss Terry’s expert guidance, we were out quickly and smoothly.

Once we left the park, we pulled off the side of the road to hook up the van. I have to tell you, after hassling with our old Brake Buddy auxiliary brake, I sure love the SMI Stay-In-Play unit we replaced it with. No more lugging the heavy brake in and out of the cab of the van, no more fiddling around with fitting an arm over our brake pedal and adjusting it to work. We just turn on the SMI, do a quick brake light check, and off we go.

Well, we do when the brake lights work. This time around, we had turn signals on the van, but no brake lights. I discovered that one of the brake lights on the bus was out also. So I removed the lens cover and jiggled the light bulb, and it was just a loose connection. I put everything back together, and voila, it all worked!

Then I scanned through our tire pressures on our PressurePro tire monitoring system, thanking our pals Mike and Pat McFall once again for convincing me how handy it is, and off we went.

We had a quick and easy 90 mile run on Interstate 10, got onto the 202 Loop just outside of the Phoenix metropolitan area, and scooted around the south side of town, arriving at Pacific Manor on Apache Trail just over two hours after we hit the road. Traffic was light, the bus ran fine, and it was a good day for traveling, even if it was a relatively short distance.

We had one little mishap just after we got on the surface streets, when I turned a corner and one of our cabinet doors sprang open and dumped a pile of canned goods and other food items onto the floor. Fortunately nothing broke open or spilled, so clean up wasn’t much of a problem. It’s just one of those irritating little things that happen sometimes when you live and travel in an RV.

Compared to the time I pulled out of an RV site in Wyoming and swung too early, banging the back end of our first motorhome against the concrete utility pedestal; or the incident early in our fulltiming days, when I pulled out of an RV park with all of our window awnings still out, this was no big deal.

As Miss Terry says when I pull dumb stunts like that, “Nick happens.”

Thought For The Day - Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

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