What a site this morning!

While sippin' my first cup of coffee this morning, gazing out my favorite window, this is what I saw. This was sooooo cooool! Four hot air balloons were launching about 100 yards out of the campground with the perfect view from our rig!

I ran to the bedroom, and woke Trish... I said, "Baby, wake up... you have got to come see this" Needless to say, she is so into stuff like this, she put on her jeans and a sweater and ran outside with her camera and telephoto lens and took about 200 pictures in the next 30 minutes. I will go through them and add a few to our "current sites" folder here on the BLOG. What a great way to start a Sunday morning! This was such an incredibly peaceful site...

Jim

Merry Christmas from Phoenix

I hope everyone is well! Trish was down with the flu for a week but is doing much better... Praise the Lord for that, I lost about 7 pounds! We are planning a trip over to the Grand Canyon for Christmas. We are driving the Jeep and leaving the Rig in Phoenix so we should be able to get some interesting pictures. I will post them in our "current sites" link in the upper left of this BLOG site. Stay tuned...

Boy... We have so much to be thankful for. A lot of the people here in Phoenix seem to be hard hit by the current economic conditions. There are so many houses here for sale and so many foreclosures. Most of the full time RVers we have met are just happy to see the price of gas and diesel back down to where they feel they can travel more often. We were so fortunate to sell the Florida house when we did. We closed on it in June of this year and from what we understand the prices in Panama City Beach are still falling. It seems we got out just in time!

We are so happy we decided to bring the Jeep along. It really works well for the days we go out and sell for Air Photo. It should also allow us to explore some parts of the desert and get some interesting pictures. The landscape here is so different from anything we have ever seen. So far the weather has been good except for the storm that dropped snow in Las Vegas! It was cold, rainy and windy here in phoenix. It also dropped 12 inches of snow in Flagstaff which is about 100 miles north of us... Today it is suppose to be sunny and a high of 63... That's more like it!

More later... Merry Christmas!! or should I say, "Happy Birthday Jesus ! " Thank you GOD for this perfect gift you have given us... This gift of eternal life truly defines LOVE in the purest form... Thank you Lord for you alone are worthy of praise and worship!

Jim ( A King's Kid!)

We are in Phoenix for Christmas and the Winter

Merry Christmas to all! We have moved from Athens, Alabama to the Pioneer RV Resort in northwest Phoenix... What a great trip we had! 1800+ miles of really beautiful country and trouble free travel with the 5er. Trish drove the Jeep and followed me towing the 5er. That was the only part of the trip that could have been better. With a larger truck I would have felt good enough to double tow the Jeep behind the 5er after we reached Texas and the rest of the trip. We saw many 5ers double towing with the same truck we have...

The truck averaged 11.5 MPG and the Jeep averaged 23MPG. We were pleasantly surprised to see the price of diesel and gas drop as we traveled west. In Alabama we paid $2.59/gal for diesel as we were leaving, the last fill up about 100 miles south of Phoenix we paid $2.03/gal. That made the trip cheaper than we budgeted for!!

We are so amazed at the landscape here... Trish is enamored with the very large cactus plants that are everywhere here in the desert. This campground has them growing wild all throughout the landscape and it is so different to us. Fascinating to say the least...

We are starting to work our first roll of film for Air Photo, Inc. this week. It is taking a little "getting use to", to be able to find these homes because the streets and driveways are really different for us. Different as they are not your typical concrete like in the east. Everything here is gravel, rock, or very coarse sand. Again... I will say fascinating to us. This is such an interesting lifestyle for Trish and I. We are experiencing very new and different things!!

The picture was taken the day we left Alabama... We had planned to leave on Monday.. but it snowed that day, we postponed our departure by a day. Tuesday was very cold with a heavy frost. WE DO NOT OWN AN ICE SCRAPER... This is Trish scrapping the ice off the mirror with her American Express card!!! TOO COLD, we are heading south and west.

Phoenix is much warmer... Much more to come... and more pictures soon... Jim