Currently in Tonopah AZ (Low 27 Sunny High 62)
We were surprised when we were setting up here at Saddle Mountain RV Park that a hummingbird flew into the truck while the door was open. This encouraged us to get a feeder that we could suction cup to our back window. We got some great shots.
We even had some woodpeckers decide the feeder might be to their liking. Here is one eyeing the feeder.
Then trying to feed.
The hummingbirds did not appreciate the interlopers.
The cats liked the activity, we did too.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Tonopah AZ (Low 36 Sunny and Cooler High 57)
As promised here are just a few of the amazing sunsets that we have seen in our months stay in Tonopah Arizona near the Saddle Mountains.
Some of the most amazing sunsets we have ever seen. We also got a picture of the rare full cold moon. For this one it is an almost full cold as neither one of us was up early enough for peak.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Tonopah AZ (Low 41 Clouds and Sun High 65)
Merry Christmas!!
What follows is the note we sent with our Christmas cards. It gives a good summary of our lives since last Christmas.
It certainly was an interesting year! We have spent almost the entire year in Goodyear Arizona trying to find some relief for Jo’s neck and back pain. We have blogged (http://bobandjotravelblog.blogspot.com/) throughout the year and following our blog is the best way to keep up on us. Our photos of all the places we have visited since we began fulltiming is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobandjotravel/sets/. Here is a brief summary of what has happened in our lives over the last year.
We spent last Christmas in our winter spot in Goodyear Arizona just west of Phoenix. We had started Jo out at a pain center in December thinking that was enough time to allow us to leave in April. Everything pain management related happens one after the other and since the pain center is incredibly busy scheduling appointments became a nightmare. We would finish one and the earliest we could get the next one was a month away. That snowballed into spending the summer and ‘enjoying’ more 110 degree days than we thought were possible.
The hottest we saw was 117 which in a house would not be nice but in an RV was challenging. To tell you how bad it was while watching the weather at 9:20 p.m. the current temperature was usually in the lower 100s. The hottest we saw was 107, at 9p for crying out loud.
We were able to escape the heat a few times traveling to higher elevations in Pinetop and Flagstaff, both in Arizona for about a month total. It was nice to be in an area where the daytime high was cooler than the overnight low. Coming back though and try to setup in 100 degree weather was not fun. We celebrated our 6th year of living fulltime in an RV while in Goodyear.
Jo had the nerves in her neck cauterized to block the pain there and they are now working on a plan for her lower back. Cauterization probably won’t work so they are proposing implanting a nerve stimulator.
In other news we took delivery of our new 2015 Lifestyle LS38RS in February in Tucson. We have mixed emotions about our new home. We are glad that we have it and the newer air conditioners did a good job during the heat and are better than the air conditioners in our Cameo but we wish that the manufacturing process would have gone better. There were so many obvious errors that first were made and then not caught until our walkthrough.
Except for this year, 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 heading to the Midwest for family and friends. Then we will head to Michigan for summer. On the way back to Arizona we will attend the International Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque.
We hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!
See you on the road sometime!!
We leave you with our entry in the Christmas decorating contest at our park in Tonopah, we call it the Charlie Brown Saguaro :-)
Surprisingly we did not win the contest. What is neat about the photo is that the great sunset reflection is seen on the side of our fifth wheel. We will be sharing some great sunset photos in a future blog.
Till next time,
Bob & Jo
Currently in Tonopah AZ (Low 39 Partly Sunny High 75)
Another year, another adventure in Obamacare for Bob. We added cartoons so people might continue reading because Mike from the "Phannie and Mae" blog says it increases readership.
Bob lost his what he thought was expensive retiree medical coverage because Honeywell said there would multiple choices of cheap individual coverage available under Obamacare. Honeywell must have been drinking the Kool-Aid because it wasn't cheap then and it is getting more expensive and less available.
In his first year of Obamacare Bob went with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas and a PPO plan since we travel year round. After one year under Obamacare BCBS lost so much money that they have dropped all PPO plans. This year there were a lot less plans available and they cost more. Bob signed up with United Healthcare who shortly thereafter announced it was likely that 2016 would be its last year in Obamacare. Furthermore they stated they regretted getting involved at all. Obama got what he wanted, bipartisan support.
More cartoons
A couple timely with Christmas and Putin.
Finally this is how Bob feels, and he has a few more years before Medicare.
Who thought you would be looking forward to Medicare. It's not all negative with Obama as he has accomplished a couple of things that we will give him credit for. Jimmy Carter is no longer the worst President and Medicare is looked upon more favorably. Thankfully Bob can no longer say that he voted for the worst President twice.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Tonopah AZ (Low 33 Plenty of Sunshine High 68)
We left Goodyear Arizona yesterday and drove a short distance west to Tonopah to the Saddle Mountain RV Park. Here we are parked in our site.
To the right
To the left
The sunsets here are supposed to be nice and we are in a good site to see them. Here is the first night's sunset.
During our setup here with the truck door open Jo saw a hummingbird fly into the truck so we got the hint and put up a feeder stuck to our window. Didn't take long for our first visitor.
The cats will sure enjoy the new visitors.
We decided on this one month stay to give us another trip or two to exercise our RV before our warranty runs out. We are glad that we did because we are still having problems with our Bigfoot automatic leveling system. Oh well the joys of this lifestyle.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Goodyear (Low 34 Sunny High 68)
We thought that the pumpkin extravaganza for this year was pretty much over, except for pumpkin pie for the holidays. We were are at a farmers market and saw pumpkin cornbread. We of course bought some and it was good. That got us thinking of the best pumpkin we had this year, the final four so to speak. Here they are not in any particular order, first Krispy Kreme Pumpkin Spice donuts.
Pumpkin Spice Popcorn from Costco.
Pumpkin Spice Scones from Trader Joe's.
Pumpkin Cheesecake at Ruby Tuesdays, one of the best we have ever had.
We had some others that were really good like the Pumpkin Spice Donettes and Edwards Pumpkin Spice Pie, Pepperidge Farm Pumpkin Milanos, and a good pumpkin pie concrete at Freddys.
So much pumpkin, so little time!
We have not done a good job blogging lately. One of the reasons is that Bob has been doing a lot of research on Obamacare for 2016 and we will have a future blog posting on that on other topics as we hopefully become a little bit more regular in our blogging.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Goodyear AZ (Low 40 Sunny High 73)
We have to say as senior citizens we agree with this,
Experience never gets old. Although we may disagree with the premise of the movie, that a retiree would be bored and would look to an internship at a startup internet company, we felt that this was a good movie to see.
Recently widowed Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro) becomes a senior intern at a clothing supply internet company run by Jules Olsen (Anne Hathaway). Ben's business acumen and lessons learned from a long life help him develop friendships and assist the struggling company.
Great acting as usual from these two and others. We really enjoyed the home burglary scene. Once we got past the feeling that you could be bored in retirement we really enjoyed the movie and recommend it.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Goodyear AZ (Low 50 Cloudy High 68)
With our limited closet space we have drastically reduced the number of t-shirts, and overall clothing we have purchased since we began fulltiming over 6 years ago. The Kansas City Royals' magical run to a World Series title caused us to make a few purchases. First when the Royals won the American League Pennant we bought these.
Then when the Royals won the World Series we bought these, one for each of us.
Then we saw this on Facebook
Bob graduated from Iowa State with a BS in Mechanical Engineering a long time ago, so long that he started out with a slide rule :-)
It has been so long ago that Jo thinks that Bob could make money by not wearing the shirt since Iowa State would not want that to be known.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Goodyear AZ (Low 45 Sunny High 66)
We certainly learned a lot more about weather during our summer in the blast furnace that is the valley of the sun, the greater Phoenix Arizona area, than we really wanted to learn.
Monsoons - we thought the monsoon season was in the tropics but the Phoenix area has what they call the monsoon season. The hurricanes in the Caribbean get more press coverage but the same weather pattern that causes those hurricanes also kick up fronts off of the western side of Mexico. Unlike Hurricane Patricia which went northeast into Mexico most of the storms head northwest out to sea. The moisture from those fronts is drawn up into Arizona for the monsoon season from June 15 to September 30. Mid-July to mid-August is the peak. Arizona gets about half its annual rainfall during this period.
Monsoons kick off some interesting weather. We had 60mph winds blowing rain and dust at us and 100mph winds reported. During monsoons there can be supercells and microbursts which we had heard about. But we learned two more weather items; gustnados and cold-air funnels. There were some amazing photos during this monsoon season.
Gustnado - a specific type of short-lived, low-level rotating cloud that can form in a severe thunderstorm, or a monsoon. Here is one from the news cast.
Cold-Air Tornado - cold-air funnel clouds are usually short-lived and generally much weaker than the vortices produced by supercells. Although cold-air funnels rarely make ground contact, they make touch down briefly and become weak tornadoes or waterspouts. Here is a rare cold-air tornado taken from the news broadcast that occurred in Goodyear Arizona where we stayed all summer. We were in Flagstaff at the time.
We saw some great sunsets aided by the monsoon activity.
A valley photographer developed a 9 minute movie on this monsoon season. Here is a link to that story and hopefully the news story they showed on Fox 10 Phoenix. For Marvel Cinematic Universe fans some of his earlier storm footage was featured in 'Thor'.
At first we were a little dubious about the monsoon season since whenever they talk about a lot of rain it is usually 1 inch or less. But it only took one time driving in the high winds, and what rain they get is usually in a very short time, to truly understand what the monsoon season was all about.
Now that summer has passed we can say that we like being in Arizona again. Seems like we went from triple digits to our regular winter weather real fast. Last night the temperature was 55 while watching the weather at 9:20p. During the summer one time we saw 107, yes, still triple digits at that time of the day. Not just that day but triple digits a number of days hanging around that late. We are so looking forward to a nice winter here.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
Currently in Goodyear AZ (Low 55 Sunny High 79)
When we started the blog we decided it would only be travel and food and avoid religion and politics. As Linus from the Charlie Brown strip said, "There are three things that I've learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."
In spite of that advice and our earlier feelings we offer this nonpartisan 3 point plan to fix our current political system, because it is broke. We have heard that we need a third party but we believe we already have three parties; Democrat, Republican and Washington. No matter what the great intentions are with the newbies once they get to Washington they only worry about being able to get reelected and not doing what is best for the country. Here is the 3 Point Plan.
1. Term Limits - the Founding Fathers never intended Congress to be a lifetime job.
2. All laws passed should apply to everyone including all elected officials but especially Senators and Representatives. For instance, imagine how they would feel if Social Security was their pension and not the outlandish pension they awarded themselves?
3. Any entity that receives federal funding should not be allowed to donate to political candidates or lobby for funding. Ridiculous that we send them tax dollars so that they can send it back to Senators and Representatives to get more tax dollars for funding and support.
The path forward is a Constitutional Convention since we cannot count on the Senators and Representatives to vote for these changes to the Constitution. This Constitutional Convention should address Term Limits since a previous attempt was deemed unconstitutional, and probably address the applicability of laws to Congress since they would also never do this on their own. Political contributions would probably also need an Amendment since it has some free speech implications. Any other amendments to the Constitution could be considered at that same Convention. Then 2/3rds of the States would have to approve the Amendment(s).
No matter what the politicians say during the election cycles, they are only out for one thing and that is for themselves.
Till next time,
Bob and Jo
