Cruising Into New Year

Yesterday was a good opportunity for us to talk about and plan our year for 2013. We've enjoyed the down time we've had since we arrived here in late October, but we need to look ahead at commitments we've made for 2013. As we get further along in this adventure, we are cutting back the work time a little bit so that we can have more enjoyment and free time at the locations where we will be staying. If possible, we would like to get a 4 day work schedule at the Virginian Lodge in Jackson Hole this year. One of the couples already has a shorter schedule but they have been returning for 10 years. We'll see about that.

In the meantime, we have the Valentine's Day schedule in February for Josie to work at the flower shop again and that will be followed by both of us working the Spring Training baseball schedule at Surprise Stadium in late February and all of March. We have our first meeting with the GM of ARAMARK on Monday, January 7. There will only be 6 days during that schedule where there will not be a game scheduled, but the working days should be shorter depending on the length of the ball games each day.

The first of April we will be heading to Washington to spend the whole month visiting family and enjoying the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival that is held each year during April in La Conner and Mt Vernon. We will be placing our fifth wheel in the Thousand Trails storage facility at the Preserve in La Conner at the end of April while we fly back to Illinois to help Patty with her family while she and Mark attend his "winners" club in Hawaii for a week. Sometime in early May we will return to Washington, pick up our fifth wheel and head to Wyoming.

Following another (hopefully) wonderful summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we will travel to Illinois to visit with Patty's family before heading back to Arizona for the winter. We are thinking at this point that we will stay at Lake Pleasant in Peoria next winter, but that can change between now and then. We like staying here at Happy Trails, but the extra costs associated with staying here do not justify the convenience, although there certainly is a value added to staying in Surprise.

There are no other working assignments planned beyond next summer. We hope to be able to take one last looong trip to Alaska, Canada, with a sweeping return through the country to end up back in Arizona sometime during the winter of 2014. Without trying to plan too much detail, we are leaving the next step beyond that open for discussion, depending on how our health is and what our longer term goals will be.

While enjoying the Rose Parade on TV yesterday, we were entertained by another of the several humming birds that are utilizing our feeder that is attached to the window:

This one, although not obvious in the picture, has a red-feathered neck. There is another that has blue feathers around the neck and still another that is all brown. This one, as near as I can tell, is an Anna's Hummingbird. I'll try to find some info on the others.

That's about it for this, the start of the second day of the new year...