Time to Catch Up - Part I

A Very Different Holiday Season

In August we filed an insurance claim to replace our roof.  Finally, the claim was approved and we scheduled the work to be done starting the 14^th of Nov.

We made a hotel reservation for a week, but of course, the job did not get finished, which carried us into the week of Thanksgiving.  It was going to be a short week and the chances of getting our home out of the shop by Thursday were decreasing rapidly.

Brian had planned to stay with us in the RV, but now it looked like the 3 of us might have to spend Thanksgiving in a hotel room.

However, our heavenly father knows our needs before we do and in this case, he provided a way we could spend Thanksgiving in a much more comfortable situation.

Some friends of Chris and Angie said they were going out of town for the week and we could stay at their house while they were gone.

It couldn’t have worked out better.  We had a great Thanksgiving, everyone had a place to sleep and the house was wonderful.  5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms plus a theater room, game room (with Ping Pong table) and a huge dining room where we enjoyed Jane’s wonderful Thanksgiving lunch. 

Christmas was also unlike any we had had previously.  We had a new roof and after getting a new set of axles, the house was set up in our “home” city of Livingston, TX.  It’s where our mail forwarding service is located, 70 miles northeast of Houston, in the piney woods of east Texas.

                                                              Jane's unique Christmas tree

Chris, Angie and the kids spent Christmas Day with Chris’ family, 90 miles to the south.  Brian came to spend a couple days and the 7 of us slept at our house on Christmas night.  For 7 people to sleep in our house on wheels was a record that will probably never be broken, at least we hope so.

We had a great Christmas celebration on the 26th and the weather was nice enough that we ate Jane’s fantastic Christmas lunch outside, under the awning. 

 

Brian went back home to resume work, but the six of us spent the next few days going to the park, playing with new toys and games and just enjoying meals and being together.  Caleb rode his new bike in the park and we shot rockets while Hannah painted, danced and sang songs.

 While the rest of humanity was getting ready to count down to 2017, we were on the road again, headed west on I-10.  We made it to Junction, TX and then drove on New Year’s Day to Las Cruces, NM.  We had 300 miles left and made it 299.25 before our right rear wheel on the RV fell off, tearing up the side of the RV.  Seems the guy who put our wheels back on, when we had the axles replaced, forgot to put the cotter pin back in the spindle. 

Some people would say that we were lucky that the wheel fell off less than a mile from our destination.  We were lucky that it didn’t happen 30 seconds sooner, when we were going 65 mph on I-10.  We were lucky that the wheel didn’t hit another car and hurt someone.  I prefer to believe that we have a loving heavenly father who is able to protect us from harm.  We drove 1129 miles, mostly on the interstate at 65 mph and the wheel fell off when we were making a turn at 5 mph.  Thank you Lord.

 

A good Samaritan in a pickup truck behind us stopped and picked up our wheel for us.  We agreed that he would go home (a short distance away) and come back with a ratchet and chain.  Another passerby stopped and called the Sheriff’s department to send a squad car to assist.  I used my 2.5 ton floor jack to raise the axle up off the street and we were able to limp in to the RV resort to a temporary site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In spite of having to get estimates, schedule the work, countless emails with the company that caused the damage, and then getting the work done, we managed to get involved in the activities of the park.  I started playing pickleball, Jane went to line dancing and together we took a class in ballroom dancing, learned the foxtrot (sort of) went to a couple of concerts and several dances and tried to do the things we were expecting to do when we arrived.  We got to see the people we had met last time we were in Tucson and made new friends.  Jane took a beginner pickleball lesson and played games with beginners. (We all know that I am not athletic……so this has been quite a stretch! Jane)

Part II follows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Grandparents

Howdy, from Dickinson, TX.  You’re probably saying, “Where in the world is that? And Why go there?”

It’s 30 miles south of downtown Houston.  Museums, symphonies, professional sports, NASA and more.

It’s 23 miles north of Galveston.  Beaches, touristy stuff like Star Drug Store, La Kings, etc.

It’s 13 miles from the home of Nolan Ryan.  Nuff said.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, it’s a 20 minute drive (not a 9 hour flight) to our Grandkids, and Chris & Angie, of course.

It’s been a new and wonderful experience to be this close to them.

When we found out that they were going to be here for a few months, our plans to spend the last quarter of the year in CA changed.  So, we’ll be in the area until the end of the year.

We have had dinners together, we’ve done church together, we’ve gone to the beach together and we’ve taken the kids to our house for fun weekends.

Like:

Lunch at Chic-fil-A

                                                                        A trip to the pool at the RV park

A day at the beach in Galveston

Gram always has a lap and a warm hug ready.

Taking a selfie with my swimming buddy.

Did we discover a crab?

No, that's just my usual look of confusion.

A soccer game with Chris & Caleb

 

A wildlife park with Caleb & Hannah

Gotta love a pony ride!

Going inside a WWII submarine at Sea Wolf Park.
(Gee, I wonder whose idea that was)

Back at Gram & Grampa's house

Doesn't everybody wear a hat with their pajamas?

A trip to the Schlitterbahn indoor water park!

And going Trick-or-Treating with Mario and Toadette

 

 

 

The park where we are is interesting.  It is inhabited mostly by oil field workers who are here for jobs and living in RVs while their families are elsewhere living in their houses.  They leave for work very early in the morning in their rather loud trucks.  We are not morning people so we just go back to sleep.   It is not a large park, but the sites surround a small "lake" so looking out the back window I see water.  And, for me,  that is a good thing.   

The Summer of '16

Well, it’s been 3 months since our last post and in stark contrast to our previous few blogs, we’ve been in two locations in 90 days.   After frantically moving every other day to reach our goal of 10 baseball parks in 21 days, we arrived in Arkansas on July 5 and prepared to spend 6 weeks and some quality family and lake time.

Lake Norfork, near Mountain Home, Arkansas (where I graduated from High School) was as beautiful as ever.  Kathy found a guy who put a new water pump impeller in the boat before we got there.  I bought a new battery, changed the oil and filter and we were ready to go.  It just doesn’t seem possible that our boat is now 8 years old.

Here we are, having lunch at the #1 rated beach in America.  Just look at that beautiful brown sand.






                                                                                                     This is our camp site at Robinson Point

 

One day, while reading the paper, Kathy noticed an article about a man who was conducting pickleball clinics in Mountain Home and they had pick-up games on Tuesdays.  Well, who would have thought there would be pickleball in Mountain Home???  The man who was organizing it had learned in Arizona just like Jim and Jim was really excited to get to play.  The first night he helped with the clinic but after that he just played.  AND one night the man in charge brought some fresh veggies from his garden and shared them with us.  Gotta love small towns. 

Work was slow, so we were able to get into a pretty steady routine of get up, eat breakfast, get some work done, fix lunch, take it out on the boat, spend the afternoon on the lake, come back, eat dinner, go back out on the lake until dark, go home and watch the Rangers.

Sometimes, we would "radically" change the schedule and go out on the boat in the morning and get some work done in the afternoon.  We did this when the heat wave hit.  It was consistently in the upper 90s and the water became so hot, it was not comfortable to swim or even be out there.  This lasted for almost two weeks.  But we still went in the evening, of course.

The Illinois Hurst families came in a few days after we arrived.  Jake, Jamie, Jackson, Trinity and little Millie along with my brother Bill and niece Adrienne were all there with their boats. 

Little Millie, the water bug.  If she wasn't jumping in after her baby, she was running up and down the lily pad and then jumping in.

 

 
We had our own armada, my ski boat, Bill’s bass boat, Jake’s jet ski, Kathy’s pontoon boat and Jake’s fast, but noisy boat in addition to Scott’s ski boat and John and Dana’s 31 ft. ocean-going  cruise ship.  It was a good week.

After 2 weeks at Robinson Point, we moved to Cranfield.  The view from our camp.



August 3^rd was my last day to be employed by United Road Towing and on August 4, I was officially unemployed and unofficially retired although URT and I had reached an agreement that I would still work for them as an independent contractor in case of an emergency requiring a large numbers of tow trucks.

 

My first day of retirement was spent in the 100 degree heat, with a chain saw.  Bob and I took a bunch of dead limbs out of a tree behind the vacation house and threw them on a pile to be burned later.

I didn't know being retired would be so sweaty.









A couple days later, we had another family reunion, this time with the Ragle and Schellinger clans.  By this time the heat wave had moved on, we had had a couple gully washers, the lake water was great and boat was still running like a sewing machine. 

 From left to right; Becca, Bill, Jane, LuAnn, Jimmie, Ed, Zach, Katie and me (not pictured because I'm the photographer).

We did our obligatory boating each day and played cards in the evening when we weren’t watching the Olympics.  One evening was spent at Bob’s singing in his garage/Karaoke studio.  There were some “memorable” performances to say the least.  I won’t mention any names, you know who you are.  And it’s on DVD.

Jimmie & Ed singing Big Rock Candy Mountain

Bill & LuAnn doing their best Sonny & Cher, singing I Got You Babe

 

 




What made it so much fun was that everyone participated, Jimmie, Ed, Bill, LuAnn, Zach, Katie, Becca Jane, Kathy, Bob and even me.  It was so much fun having everybody there. In addition to singing, there was wakeboarding, paddleboarding, skiing, tubing, swimming, cliff jumping, boating, eating, playing, and Olympics watching. 



Katie combined paddleboarding with her gymnastics background (showoff!)  I'm jealous.

I gave her a 10, "amplitude" you know.

Jimmie showing off her wakeboard skills.  I gave her a 10 because she did this in spite of multiple hip and back surgeries and being sixty-uh . . . I mean fifty-uh... I mean forty something.
 

 

Becca and Katie having a battle on the tube.

 

                                            It seems like only yesterday Zach and Katie took the big. . . . .

LEAP!   YEEEEHHHAAAAHHH!!!



"You can't swim?  What difference does that make?  The fall will probably kill you!" Butch Cassidy










Job obligations and daily routines can't be suspended indefinitely, so the Ragle clan went back to their respective lives, Zach and Katie to Denver and Bill, LuAnn and Becca to Ohio.   That left Jimmie, Ed, Jane and I to continue the festivities.  One day we decided to visit Blanchard Springs Caverns. 

It was really cool down there. . .  no I mean it, really cool, like 68 degrees.

 

Amazing how big those "rooms" are.  Over 100 feet from the floor to the ceiling.

 

Our last day in Arkansas was a Saturday and my high school senior class held a 65^th birthday party at a pavilion in the campground where we were camped.  It was great fun seeing classmates from the 1969 graduating class of Mountain Home High School.

 Then, it was back to Texas for our annual doctor and dentist visits.

We were very excited and looking forward to seeing Angie, Chris and the kids, back from London and taking them to Arkansas for a few days of boating.  We were going to leave the "rolling estate" in Texas.  Chris’ parents were kind enough to loan us their mini-van and we’d all pile in, drive to Ark and stay in the vacation house. 

Then the emergency happened.  Widespread flooding hit Louisiana, and all of a sudden, I was un-retired and working 14-16 hours a day.

We still drove to Arkansas, still went out on the boat and still did the things we had planned, but I just had to work during it all.  I worked at the house and on the boat, making phone calls and working on my computer.  We had to stop the boat and swim at places on the lake where I could get adequate cell reception, but we did it.

Caleb not only loved jumping off the boat, but he was a tubing maniac.  It didn’t matter who was with him, Daddy, Gram or Momma, he kept giving me the “thumbs up” to go faster.  Hannah, on the other hand, has not yet developed a fondness for the water, but then she hasn’t had the opportunities that Caleb has.  She’s got enough Hurst blood that it’s only a matter of time.  But she always loves to swing.

Caleb also tried my snorkel and was hooked on that too. 

 

One night me, Caleb and Angie made smores, after the flames died down, of course.

We had to get back to Arlington on Thursday because we had tickets to the Rangers game and Star Wars fireworks on Friday.  We met Brian at the stadium and even though the Rangers got thumped, we had a great time and the fireworks were super. 

Caleb puts the "X" in Texas

                                    And you gotta have a foam finger!




Hannah, getting into the game.  No wait!  "Is that man selling cotton candy?"











The kids did great and Hannah loved the fireworks and playing with Uncle Brian. 

The next day the Lynches had to get down to Friendswood so Caleb could start first grade on Monday.  The “London Lynches” aren’t going to be in London any longer.  They are praying about what God has for them next. 

Jane here. . .

We have had a great time while camped here in Arlington.  On our first Sunday, we went to the church where we are still members and Russ, our pastor, invited us to his house that evening for his birthday party.  He said all of the old gang would be there and they were.  What a great time of catching up, laughing and partying.  While there, some longtime friends invited us to the Ranger game with them on Tuesday and we had a fun time with Stu and Marty.  On the day of the aforementioned 65^th birthday party for the class of ’69, another longtime friend called us in Arkansas and asked if we would like to use their season tickets to go to the TCU/Arkansas football game in September in Fort Worth.  So we did that and it was quite a game and quite a win for the Razorbacks.  Had dinners with Dale and Vicki, Mike and Wanice and Steve and Debbie while here.  We’ve all known each other since before we had kids and now we are all talking about retirement.  You can’t beat friendships like that. 

 

Tomorrow we are headed south.  Our original plan to spend the winter in southern California has been altered since our grandkids are in the Houston area until the end of the year.  We will be near them while they are there and then the plan is to go to Arizona to spend January through March.  Voyager is Jim’s favorite RV park so far and he is excited to go back there.  We met some great people there last time and are looking forward to seeing them again.  Catch some Rangers spring training (after they win the World Series this year ;) ) in March, then head out for games at the west coast baseball parks.   It won’t be nearly as hectic as this season when Jim wore me out on that 10 parks in 21 days run! 

Mission Accomplished

When we started this stretch of 10 ballparks in 23 days, I was skeptical that we could get 'er done without hitting some kind of snag or schedule deviation along the way.  The schedule was very tight, 3 days in one spot, 2 days in another and although I did have to make a schedule change, we were able to make all 10.

We wore jackets and jeans in Chicago because guess what, it was cold and windy!

 

If you zoom in, you can see that it really does say US Cellular Field

 

The GM at our Chicago tow company gave us his season tickets, great seats 10 rows back.

 

 

They have a really neat area for kids out in the left field side of the stadium.  There are batting cages, a place where they are timed running from home to first, a mock infield where a guy throws ground balls to the kids

 and a shooting gallery type area where you throw baseballs at cutout images of catchers and when you hit them, they fall over.

 

Two nights later we were in Milwaukee for a Brewers game.  They have a really nice ballpark with a retractable roof. 

 

This is a beautiful park.  I can't believe the Rangers will have a new stadium with a roof in 2021. 

Speaking of beautiful parks, this is our camp site in Stoughton, WI.

 



And yes, for some unknown reason, there's a duck head out in the middle of an open field.

We were camped near Madison, which gave us a chance to see some dear friends we haven't seen in 13 years, Bill & Sharon Napier.  Our kids grew up together until they moved to Madison 26 years ago. 

We had a wonderful dinner at their house and did 13 years of catching up. And it was Jane's birthday, so we had cake and ice cream. 
 

Last stop, Minneapolis, eh?  I mean really, we are almost in Canada don't you know?

And the strange thing is, they built a new stadium in 2010 and DIDN'T put a roof on it!!  Crazy Minnesotans, Minnesota-ites?  Whatever!

For some reason, we like parks where you can see the downtown part of the city from your seat. (We know that's not going to happen in Arlington)

 

This is the farthest north we've been in our "rolling estate".  We parked at Mall of America and took the light rail to the game.  It was very easy. What are the odds of our meeting a man on the train who lives in Lewisville (where we lived for eight years before we started our travels) and flew up for the game because he is also on a quest to visit all the baseball parks?????  Pretty slim, I think. BUT we did.   When we got back, we had to make a run through the mall.  I didn't know they had an entire amusement park inside.

Here's a shot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ride.

It would take a whole day to walk through this place.
We are spending a few extra days in Minnesota to get a repair done to the RV (which, fortunately, is happening now and not in the middle of our 23 day sprint) and then, strangely enough, we don't know where we are going.  On July 5, we will start our summer stay on the lake in Arkansas, but until then we have to make some travel decisions.  We might go to Texas to find out where the city is in which we "live".  Our address is in Livingston, Texas, at a mail forwarding center run by Escapees RV Club.  When people ask us where Livingston is and we tell them we don't know, we get some really strange looks.  But I need to renew my driver's license which expired last week. I didn't know that after renewing it online for 12 years, I have to appear and have a new picture taken.  They seem to think I might have changed in 12 years. Nah!  South Dakota is also in the running for our "spare time".  After Arkansas, we have our travel plans in place through April or May of next year.

So come back soon to see where we wind up for the next three weeks!

 

This is where we are currently and they have the biggest Cottonwood tree I've ever seen.

 

Maybe this will give it a little better perspective.  If you look closely, you can see Jane standing at the base of the tree.  I'm guessing the trunk is 25 ft. in circumference.