In any event, we'll try to get things going again, and keep up our chronicle of our adventures. The first major item that occurred after we got here -- and went through our scramble to get a different lot and get settled in there -- was to get ready to go to spend Christmas with our sons and their families in central Texas. We hadn't had an opportunity to spend the holidays with them for several years, and with the increasing size of their families, it was something we really wanted to do. We flew from Phoenix and arrived a couple of days before Christmas and stayed until just before New Year's -- unfortunately the weather was unseasonably cold there (just when we were getting used to the Arizona sun) but we had a great time celebrating the holidays with our brood.
Here's a picture of us with both of our sons and their families during our visit.
My brother John also came through the Austin area for a couple of days -- he'd flown to Chicago to pick up a class B van conversion that he'd purchased, and was driving it back to his home in Santa Fe. We're looking forward to seeing him on the road as he transitions to retirement.
Both before and after our Texas trip we got back into our bicycling here in Yuma with the Foothills Bicycle club. This our main activity during the winter and it gets us back in shape after our summer play time. We're enjoying four rides per week with the club and also taking advantage of some mountain biking and tandem riding also.
In early January we took advantage of a great last minute deal on a 4 day cruise out of San Diego, and had a great time with ten other couples from the bike club. We left from the Cruise Terminal in San Diego, and visited Catalina Island and Ensenada, and had a great time with everyone.
In mid-January after a month of running around for the holidays and the cruise, we got back into our cycling and have been having a great winter here on our bikes. We're not riding as much to the east of here in Dome Valley due to some road closures, but have been on all of the other routes a number of times this season, and are currently managing to get in anywhere from 100 to 150 miles per week.
Later this month Greg will be going to Seattle to visit his mother and his sister Margaret and her husband Charlie -- and also get a chance to collect the information to do his mom's taxes. On the way back he'll be flying as far as Denver, where he'll see his brother Tom in Boulder. From there he'll drive back to Yuma in our new (to us) Mazda pickup! Tom has had an older Mazda 4WD pickup for a number of years and we've purchased it from him to have as a utility vehicle here in Yuma -- it will be great to have to go out into the desert for exploring, and to have just for general use around town. We'll store it in our storage unit when we leave for the summer, and it will be all ready for us when we return next fall.
One of our full-moon potlucks in the desert just out of Yuma
Toward the end of March we'll be taking a trip to Tucson with the bike club to do some cycle exploring. For 4 days we'll ride in bike-friendly Tucson and see a number of sights -- the mission of San Xavier del Bac, the Sonoran Desert Museum, ride the Santa Fe Trail out to Colossal Cave, and maybe even have time to try our legs on Mt. Lemmon (about a 6000 ft. climb). It's a great opportunity for a trip to a wonderful city which really loves cyclists -- and we're looking forward to it.
We've also made a recent technological advance - we left our longtime cellphone provider AT&T and joined up with Sprint. We'd been getting increasingly disappointed with AT&T's coverage, particularly during our travels during the summer, and we're anticipating improvements with Sprint. The other big advantage was that we were able to join them as part of our son Brian's family plan, so our costs were significantly lowered -- and we were able to upgrade to Blackberry smartphones, which give us all sorts of increased capabilities. We ported our AT&T numbers to Sprint (it was actually pretty painless) so our contact information remains the same.
We'll try to be more responsive in posting blog updates from here on in -- stick with us and we'll keep you posted.
