Birthdays and Beginnings……

Its two days before Christmas and it’s 65 degrees outside here in Virginia. No white Christmas for us this year…Shucks ! Now that’s what I’m talking about. Up home, in PA, they are still covered in 4-5” of the white, glazed over snow from the last storm. No love lost here of missing that type of weather…Furnace is off, warm breeze blowing outside and Sunday football on the tube…can’t ask for much more than that on a Sunday afternoon.
The next two weeks will be one for birthdays and anniversaries for us. It was last December, the 27th to be exact, that we rolled into St. Louis on a Greyhound bus to pick up our bundle of joy. We felt like proud parents as we laid our eyes on our beautiful, bouncing girl….and Bertha has been part of the journey ever since. For those of you not knowing who Bertha is…..she’s our GMC 5500 truck that we purchased from a dealer in St. Louis. We rode 24 hours on multiple buses, through numerous bus terminals, to go pick her up. Now, almost a year and 10,000 miles later, she is firmly entrenched in our lives.
On January 2nd, we’ll have another occasion when we celebrate the date upon which our 5th wheel arrived. Destiny, as we’ve named her….was delivered to us by the RV dealer in Iowa that we ordered her from. We waited anxiously for her arrival so that we could move out of the itty bitty camper that we’d been renting since the end of October and into our new home and our new way of life. We went through several big snow storms last winter and days of bitter cold temps. Having a day in December here of 65 degree temps is wonderful to us, compared to wind chills, in PA last year, of -16 degrees. Yikes !!
The views out our rear view window aren’t changing like they did just a few months ago and it is harder to get inspiration to write new posts for our blog. The fact that we don’t currently have internet at our site, due to the park being closed and the cable modem being shut off, I try to write entries when I can and save them to post when I get to the public library. Perhaps many of our followers are disappointed that we are not “traveling” like we had been. From my perspective, I think it was fortuitous that I took this job at this point in time. Due to situations that occurred with our families, it was good that we were in the area and not a great distance away. I feel that our lives are made up opportunities, from which we can grow as a person. This job…this “opportunity” was presented to me for a reason. Although I have worked 30 years in the hospitality business, there certainly are many areas of this vast field that I have not been exposed to. One of those being resort management in the RV business. This job offers me the ability to learn so much about that business from a man who has high ideals for his businesses and doesn’t sit still for very long. I love to learn about new things, accept new challenges and I have that here where I know no one and have to start from scratch with making business contacts, search out distributors for products and services and learn about the area and their culinary preferences. It is a big challenge but the kind I enjoy. How long will this job keep us here ? Don’t know…..till it’s no longer challenging and there is no more to learn. For it’s only in learning that we grow as individuals.
To all of our family and friends reading this….thank you for following the first year of our journey. Stay tuned in 2008 for more to come. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, surrounded by the ones you love and hoping that 2008 brings you all the opportunities that you are hoping for ! God Bless !

Linda and Linda