Category: Personal

Francine and Gilles

February 5th 2020

Well once we get the ice out of the humming bird feeder, today is going to be a special day. The Bannon’s are stopping by our little piece of desert to pick us up for a trip to Yuma for lunch with Francine and Gilles, we have not seen them since since last spring in Florida. We had planned a visit in January, but because of unforeseen issues, we were unable to get together before we had to move on. But all systems are a go today.

So the plan was to meet at a place in Yuma called Burgers & Beer, what could possibly be wrong with that, I just happen to like both of those items. But when I got looking at the menu there were so many items that looked really good, I bounced between a bacon wrapped hot dog, a blue cheese burger, but I settled on a shrimp poor boy and I do believe it was an excellent choice. It was great to catch up on the past few months and discover what everyone has planned for the short term as well as the long range plans for next winter. It seems that we are all aimed for different part of the southern states next winter. Again keeping in touch with all these full time travelers is easy with social media but being able visit with everyone keeps becoming more difficult as next winter has people scattered from the Carolinas to Arizona and a number of spots in between. While our winter plans are not set in stone we are still looking at a number of options, in fact it really is too far off for us to be doing anything other just pitching ideas back and forth, because we are ok just boondocking for a winter of living off grid is ok with us.

Notice how I tried to make it ok by adding a salad…lol

It is always great getting together with our RV family, and when your friends are from all different areas and travel full time there are always some great stories of places that have been visited, adventures that have been memorable, stories of travel issues either road conditions, new city bypasses, and of course equipment problems, and of course discussing everyone’s travel plans, either short and long term as we try to plan our next opportunity for a rendezvous.

Shari, Laurie, Francine, Gilles, Myself and Bob

But our day did not end with lunch, as our tour guides took us sight seeing to the sand dunes in Glamis CA and to the bird sanctuary at Cibola AZ, both were new to the Buchanan’s and both will be worthy of revisiting, just a couple more amazing spots out here in the desert.

North Algodones Dunes Wilderness Area
Cibola National Wildlife Refuge

No union here!

Well that went well…NOT. How very sad for both parties…on one hand you have a full blown campaign speech full of inaccurate facts and figures, then you have the childishness of teenagers with not shaking hands and tearing up the copy of the speech. But it just looked like another day in Washington, as seen by most outsiders. Oh Facebook is full of jabs back and forth and most of them the truth, which is better then a number of points in the speech, which normally would be a “State of the Union” not a campaign stop speech talking about planting a flag on Mars…like seriously.

I know the stock market is strong and well, but I’m wondering how many of the working homeless would be in agreement, like those people living in tents in Seattle that have jobs but can’t afford to rent a home because of inflation, even a postal worker but homeless. And that’s just one example, there is a huge homeless issue in the States.

There were other touching moments with ties to education and people being terrorized, we have personally seen the wall and it is an impressive undertaking that has been installed in some easy areas, the tough part is still ahead as they move into more remote areas.

There were many well choreographed things like the service member reunited with his family, beautiful and touching but seen almost weekly on most local television stations. Recognizing well deserving retired service members was a nice touch, possibly tarnished a bit by honouring an out spoken radio host.

I guess that I was confused about the purpose of the address, I thought it was to give a report on the state of the union, and try to unite the country, how foolish of me…let’s face it both parties have some real jewels, Mitch and Nancy being perfect examples of how not to act…if your kids carried on like they do there would be a lot of time outs, or kicks in the ass if you were from my era. It looks like it’s going to be a long noisy summer through the next eight months in the States, the name calling, the tweets, the lies, the promises, or just US politics as usual. We will be heading back south just as it’s coming to an end, but at least we will be missing over six months of the rhetoric between candidates and parties.

We have met some amazing people as we travel through the states, we have Republican and Democratic friends, and in most cases they all against the partisanship that is so obvious across this great country, so much time and money wasted with so much to be done. This is not a new thing and maybe because spending this much time subjected to it as opposed to a week or two we get a closer picture of how disfunction the Congress and Senate has become. What we have noticed is that as we spend our third year in the middle of it, it is getting worse, I think that it is time for our American friends to take a long serious hard look at who is representing them…it may be time for a change…just saying.