Right back where we started from!

We started our full-timing adventure on September 10, 2009 when we moved ourselves and our 3 cats into our new home, our condo on wheels, which was parked at the Peculiar Park Place RV Park in Peculiar Missouri. We spent two months there getting used to full-time RV living and getting everything finalized since our house sold so quickly (if anybody needs a good Realtor we sure can recommend one). Our first full-timing adventure where it was more like a vacation was when we left for Branson in early November 2009. From Branson we went to Checotah OK to Melissa TX to Livingston TX to Rockport TX to San Antonio to Kerrville TX to Pecos TX to Deming NM to Benson AZ to Goodyear AZ to Holbrook AZ to Albuquerque NM to Amarillo TX to Chandler OK and finally to Peculiar, right back where we started from :-)

While in Peculiar we will be seeing friends and family, eating at our favorite places and catching up on appointments with our many Doctors. After 5 months of full-timing coming back to this area has been an adjustment though. It is the first time in a long time that we have had to put things on calendars and the first time we have had to be somewhere on time except for Mass.

We can probably summarize our first seven months of full-timing in three simple words; weather, food and history. Weather because an El Nino year is not the year to start full-timing. What El Nino does to weather is downright criminal. We are fans of anything water so we decided our travels would first take us to the Gulf of Mexico for a month and then work our way across Texas to see friends and family in the Phoenix area in February. Everywhere we went in Texas was experiencing record cold or rain or both. In over a month in Rockport TX we had maybe 4 or 5 nice days, other than that it was about 20-30 degrees cooler and rainy and foggy. We experienced our coldest overnight temperatures just south of San Antonio. In the Texas Hill Country in Kerrville we finally had some of the weather we were looking for but this was just a stretch of 4-5 days and then El Nino reared its ugly head. It wasn't until we made it across the vast expanse that is west Texas and across New Mexico and into Arizona and arrived at Goodyear just west of Phoenix that we had great weather. In the month and a half there we had a couple of days that were cool and a couple of rainy days but for the most part the temperatures were in the low 70's and it was sunny. That was the weather we thought we would have when we started this adventure.

All good things must come to an end though and the weather impacted our travel planning on the way back. Flagstaff had record snow so we had to watch the road conditions and weather forecast for our first leg, in fact for our entire journey. We did see our first snow up front and personal on this drive as there still was snow piles right near the interstate and the mountains were covered. Albuquerque had snow the night before we planned on traveling there so we delayed a day. Amarillo also had snow the the night before we planned on traveling so we delayed yet another day. On Good Friday when we planned to travel from Chandler OK to Peculiar MO a nasty thunderstorm blew through Chandler a little after 7am and then through all points on our planned route. Let me tell you 70mph winds, hail and heavy rain sure make a lot of noise in an RV. The cats were scared and the racket woke Jo up. Needless to say we spent the day watching weather forecasts all along our route and trying to decide whether or not it was safe to travel that day. About 1pm we decided to give it a go and we never got rained on or had any trouble. The roads were still wet around Joplin and you could see that it had just rained but we timed our trip pretty good. Now El Nino occurs on average every 5 years so one thing we know for certain is that when the next El Nino is forecast we will be back in Goodyear or Yuma because the Phoenix and Yuma AZ areas were the best places to be this El Nino year.

Now to our favorite topic - FOOD. As you can tell from our blog name, "How to Love Where You Are and Eat Where the Locals Eat", we do love our food. We have found a very good question to ask people where to eat and that is for them to imagine that they have been away for awhile and are back only for a short time and can only eat at one place, what place would they eat at? This question has lead us to a whole batch of new favorite places to eat. From the ribs at Florida's Kitchen near Livingston TX to the oyster stew at Charlotte Plummers and the po boys at Alby's Seafood, both in Rockport TX to the Arizona Green Chile Eggs in Winslow AZ.

Besides food we have been filling up on history on our travels. We walked on the deck of an aircraft carrier that was the same class of carrier that Bob's dad served on in WWII. We saw a 6' scale model of the ship that Jo's dad served on in WWII. We visited the Alamo and some great small town museums.

We do plan to provide updates on the rest of journey during our two months in the Kansas City area.

Till next time,

Bob & Jo

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