Lunch with my Aunt and Uncle and other Social Events

April 07 – 12, 2014 

We really have been a little too social in the past week here in the park.  Well, social in that a little too much alcohol was had a few too many times.  

We are now officially in the off season here in the park.  That means that there have been a few “last” parties to attend and to over indulge a bit or a lot in our case.  One late night our RV steps became an obstacle course for both Patty and I.  For some reason it became very difficult to climb the steps without falling off of them.  We believe the next couple of weeks will be more relaxed as most of the seasonal folks have left to go north for the summer. 

Cactus are blooming.

Tuesday the 8th we met up with my Aunt Marilynn and Uncle Larry from Indiana.  The have been wintering in Arizona for the past few years and are looking for a change. They were thinking about Florida and I suggested that they look in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) as it is much less expensive here. So they decided to take a look at the RGV before going to Florida to look for a place to winter.

My aunt and uncle have a fixed 5th wheel that they use in the winter.  By fixed I mean that they don’t have a truck to move the RV, they leave it in one spot, fixed, on an annual basis.   We have met many people who do this and we may ourselves someday way in the future.  That is a real snow bird living with a place down here in the south and then have something up north for the summer.  Of course, most of your traveling to see the country is over by this time.  But there are many variations to this and we are keeping an open mind as to what to do in our future.

Anyway, we had a nice lunch at a Tex/Mex restaurant in Edinburg.  They had not found anything they liked so far in the area.  We are members of the RV-Dreams club and I had seen where a member had a place in Mission Texas just a few miles south for annual rent.  This place, Retama Village, is classified as a luxury resort park.  They decided to visit Retama Village before they headed to Florida after they left us and ended up liking the park.  Looks like they will have their RV moved down here at the end of the year just about the same time we get back here.  Now they don’t need to drive to Florida.  We will now get to have more lunches with them in the future here in the RGV.

Tuesday evening we had a couple (Steve and Julie) over for dinner before they left for Canada at the end of the week. They also full time RV as we do.  Steve is a member of the board for the fun association here so we had some conversations about that and about our travels around the country.  It was a very nice night but we were past our usual amount of drink and were ready for bed soon after they left.

Wednesday the 9th was the last happy hour of the season. Well don’t you just know that several of us made sure we had all of the happy hour we could get that night.  This is the night the RV steps got a lot harder to climb.  I ended up cutting the bridge of my nose on the steps somehow and Patty had skinned a shin bruised a rib on the steps. It, however, was a great night out with great friends here!

Thursday the 10th we were pretty much hungover.  Patty had a Dr. appointment for the results of the MRI she had done on her left wrist.  She had a cyst drained a few weeks ago and she was still having some pain. The results showed that her wrist was just getting older, arthritis was setting in and the pain was not unusual or something to worry about.  The Dr suggested she do some light wrist exercises to help strengthen her wrists to fight the age related degeneration.  I am trying to get her use my stretch bands. We will see how that goes.

Back home and we were ready for a short nap!

We changed out 5 12v incandescent lights to LED.  It's probably not economical to do this for us as we don't camp without power very often.  It is just a nuisance to change these as they burn out all of the time.  Still, the incandescent cost about $1 and the LED costs $16 and have just changed 6 in 2 years.

Friday the 11th we were back to feeling normal again, but that was short lived!  We kept a low profile most of the day and then decided to venture out to the Friday campfire around 7 pm.  We met up another couple who we have made good friends with (Rainy and Greg) and one thing led to another and we went to their house for drinks.  Just before midnight we stumbled back to our RV for the night.  We were being extra careful with the stairs this time and made it inside without incident!

Saturday the 12th we needed to go into town and get some miscellaneous items.  Since we are out, we decided to go to the big flea market here in Donna Texas called Don-Wes. 

Big thing here are the Texas sweet onions called 1015 onions.  Snowbirds buy them and take up north to give as gifts.  Here at the flea market they were selling 25 pounds for $7.  We bought a small amount and so far we liked vidalia better.

The flea market is nothing really to write home about however about 2/3 of the place was closed as this is after season and the snowbirds have mostly gone now.  We looked around for a short time of maybe an hour before we decided to call it quits.  We ended up not buying anything.  

We then headed to the WalMart in Weslaco about 5 miles east to pick up the few items we originally went out for.

Oh yeah, also Saturday I finished copying all of our CD music to the computer.  We now have a few over 1200 songs on the computer and on my smart phone. Our plan is to use the smart phone to connect to the truck so we can play our music when we get tired of the radio.  We are also planning to store the CDs at my brother’s house in Indiana with the little bit of stuff we have there now.

We were back in time to take a nap before darts at the pool. Darts is another good time to drink too much.  However, tonight we managed to keep from doing that again.  Anyway, my darts team won the world championship for this week. 

This was the first darts outside of the official season and we had a fairly large turnout of 5 teams, 4 teams with 4 players and one team with 5 players for a total of 21 players.  We also had maybe 7-8 people just to hangout and socialize.  It was a very good night with the temperature staying in the low 70’s all night.

Next week we plan to play golf and have dinner at a new to us steakhouse.  We also are planning to visit Mexico to pick up a few items and have a few $2 margaritas with lunch.

So, now we are just a couple of weeks away from leaving here ourselves.  I have the rig washed, the hitch inspected and lubricated, and I just lubed the RV suspension this week.  Monday the 14th we get new tires and rear brakes on the truck.  Sunday I am going to fill the fresh water tank with water and some bleach to clean it.  Then sometime in the next few days we will clean the AC filters in the RV.  The last week, the week after next, we will reorganize the under frame storage space back to our traveling mode.  Right now we have stuff ready to use and not ready to travel.  The storage  reorganization will be the last things we do to get ready to leave.

Lots of cool birds.  This one seemed to want me take it's picture. Do not know what it is though.

Stay Tuned!