Day One, 2008

I woke up this morning in time to see the beginning of the Rose Parade. I watched the whole parade - every band and every float -- from the warmth and comfort of my recliner in the motor home. This is noteworthy because last year, we were supposed to be seated in the grandstand, watching the whole thing live. Unfortunately, something happened with the traffic control, and all of the over 200 Good Sam members attending the Rose Parade Samboree sat in their buses on the freeway through half of the 2007 Rose Parade. We had spent one of the previous afternoons viewing the last minute float preparations, oohing and aahing over the beauty and intricacy of the details of several of the floats, only to miss most of them by the time we got to our seats during the parade.

So today was a treat for me to watch it and thoroughly enjoy it.

After the parade, I changed the sheets on the bed, gathered all of the laundry, and headed out to the laundry room. I don't think there is a laundry room at Lake Cachuma where we're going tomorrow so I wanted to start out with all clean stuff. I got all of that finished just in time to prepare our part of the lunch for the family. They arrived just after 1:00 and we had grilled pork loin chops, mashed potatoes, black-eyed peas, salad and pie.

This afternoon has been relaxing and discussing some of our next plans. We don't have much planned for 2008. When it warms up in Colorado, we'll visit our family and friends. We'll be attending the RV-Dreams Rally in Branson in June. Right after that we'll attend Jim's family reunion in Amarillo. Right now, that's all we have planned for sure.

We hope to get to Idaho, Oregon, and maybe Washington state this summer. We might just keep traveling and head towards New England for the fall. We've talked about going back to Rockport for next winter. But all of those are just ideas right now. We plan to take things one day at a time for now and see what looks good down the road.

Today's pictures are two trees that we can see from our front window, I took them just at the beginning of sunset.

A good beginning to the year!