How to Love Where You Are and Eat Where the Locals Eat!!: 2013 YEAR IN REVIEW

Thursday, January 2, 2014

2013 YEAR IN REVIEW

Goodyear AZ (Low 36 Sunny High 74)

2013 was an interesting year for us, a year of adventures both planned and unplanned. We spent last Christmas in the Kansas City area for Bob to recover from his aortic valve replacement surgery. Experienceing a winter in the RV reinforces our desire for warmer climates during the winter. We got most of the snow for the winter in February and March.

We left the Kansas City area in late April and still got snowed on in the Des Moines area.

This year we were able to check off a lot from our bucket list. Among those were Salisbury House in Des Moines,

tulips and sightseeing in Pella,

Grotto of the Redemption,

and the Buddy Holly sites in Clear Lake.

We then spent the summer on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in Houghton.

These were the planned adventures. What we did not plan on was some maintenance issues that caused some distress and time delays. We had some water damage while in Houghton along with almost having a fire due to our transfer switch burning out. While stressful the only impact is that we ended our summer vacation a little early and headed back to the Kansas City area for repairs and some upgrades. While the RV was being worked on we stayed in an Extended Stay Hotel in Overland Park Kansas. The upgrades we had done were replacing the RV refrigerator with a residential refrigerator and adding a dishwasher drawer.

While this was happening we celebrated our 4^th year of living fulltime in our Carriage Cameo. On our way to Goodyear Arizona we had another planned upgrade, adding day/night shades from MCD Innovations in McKinney Texas.

After that work was completed we had yet another unplanned adventure, one of our slideout motors went out. We spent an extra week or so in Abilene and San Angelo Texas getting that repaired. For the most part we don’t “have” to be anywhere at a specific date so we can enjoy the area that we are at a little longer.

Every year we jam a lifetime of vacations into one year but there is still so much more to see and do. Next year we plan on touring California to Oregon to Washington for summer then down to Denver in September and then back to Goodyear AZ for the winter.