What a year

 If you have lived on this planet for the last year you know what has been happening and how it has effected us all. There isn't a lot of point in me trying to tell you what you already know.

We survived, some really good people, good friends, didn't. Some have survived but live with the after effects. We feel very fortunate to have been untouched by it physically.

I have been unable to go out and paint. All the local art groups, except the Urban Sketchers group I run, closed their doors. We as a group work outdoors, we aren't a big group. We felt we could manage all the safety protocols and still be creative but it hasn't been easy. Inspiration just hasn't come to me. I hope it will return as we recover from this terrible blight.

I took up a hobby that I have enjoyed off and on since I was about 7. Back then my uncle and aunt bought me a model airplane for Christmas and I was hooked. From plastic kits I moved on to balsa and tissue flying models, gas powered U control planes and on to radio control planes with bigger gas engines.

Friends I made at the RC Club Rick left Daryll right

The hobby has completely changed much to my surprise. Balsa kits and planes built from plans are a thing of the past. Now Styrofoam planes with electric motors are everywhere. The radio control sets which had specific frequencies are gone, now they frequency hop and there is no limit to how many can be in the air at the same time. They have gyros built in so beginners don't have to fear crashing.

Old planes don't have the gyro system!

I missed the gas powered models and I love to build them from scratch, so when I joined the local RC club I asked if anyone flew them. Several people said they had them but hadn't flown them in years. After some prodding and organizing we got a weekly "Nitro Friday" going and the models started showing up at the field.

That has kept me busy all winter and being outdoors we could manage the risk by following the protocols.

Now here in Arizona the State has relaxed the rules, people are beginning to get out. It has been like waking from a bad dream and we have started to think about getting out on the road again.

Our plan had been to go to the UK for the whole summer and see all our old friends and our families. This year will be our 50th wedding anniversary.

Lockdowns and quarantines have killed that plan, but we still hope that we can do it next year.

We WILL be celebrating our anniversary on October 23rd in Las Vegas. Elvis will be renewing our wedding vows! We have several friends who also have wedding anniversaries around the same time and want to celebrate with us, so we have hotel and campground block bookings made for October 22nd and 23rd. We will be camping there 21st thru the 28th. If you would like to join us let us know and we will send you details of the hotel and campground we will be at (they are adjacent).

Which brings us to what is next.

The motorhome had been in storage since October last year but some friends in the park sold their trailer and needed a place to stay for 6 weeks, so we set it up on their site for them. Now they have gone and we have begun to get it ready for the new season.

The Monaco and Miata together

My model airplanes wouldn't fit in the Miata and reluctantly I sold it, replacing it with a huge Cadillac Escalade which I call the Nimitz because its a huge airplane carrier!

The Escalade is HUGE.

 

 

Our new towed vehicle the Ford Edge

 

The Fiesta saga goes on and on although we have some hope it will settle soon. Needing a car to tow we bought a 2014 Ford Edge which a friend had already set up for towing behind their motorhome. It only had 68,000 miles on it and looks almost like new.

The last day for the Miata. It's gone to live in Scottsdale.

So what's the plan?

We have decided that we are going to be leaving here around May 2nd and head over to San Diego for a couple of weeks, then we are heading diagonally across the country to the Finger Lakes area of Upstate New York. We have always liked that corner of the US and last time we were in Maine we set ourselves the task of making the lobster an endangered species. We failed miserably but did eat a lot of them. We intend to try again this year then travel south down the East Coast to see our son and his wife near Baltimore and the friends we have from when we lived there. We have friends in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina to see again too before we head back to Arizona for another winter.

There is one thing I find hard to talk about still, and that is that Barbara has been fighting breast cancer most of the winter. Its a long story but she has had 2 surgeries and several weeks of radiation treatment. She has a couple more doctor visits and some imaging to get done before we leave but we are hopeful that she has it beaten. 

I hate to end on a low note, we are hopeful that it is just the start of a climb back into the light.

Stay safe, more as we get going.

BnB