Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all our blog readers! We hope you are enjoying a beautiful Christmas season.  We are celebrating the season far from family and familiar surroundings this year. Now in our 6th month of full-time RVing, we continue to learn new things.  After settling in here in Tucson, Old Glory needed a few adjustments.  First, Mark had to tighten up some connections in our back up camera. It had been cutting out on our more recent trips and it actually went out completely about 30 minutes outside of Tucson.  Mark figured all the bumping along for thousands of miles might have knocked something loose and he was right. He got everything connected better than before and solved that problem in an afternoon.

While at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base Commissary we found some familiar items in their bakery.  The Panettone brought back memories of Christmas time at Wegmans.

Hello and Merry Christmas to our Wegmans friends, by the way.  We know Christmas time at Wegmans means a LOT of extra work.  We hope all is going smoothly for you!

We celebrated Thanksgiving quietly in the FamCamp with our traditional homemade cranberry/orange relish (Mark’s specialty) and sweet potato casserole.   We watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade first.

We continue to see new things on our daily walks around the base and FamCamp.  This plant, we learned, is called a Fairy Duster or Calliandra and it attracts birds. There are so many hummingbirds in this area!

This is a type of Cholla Cactus aka Teddy Bear cactus. The yellow flowers growing beside it are Desert Marigolds.

We found the 1 1/2 mile walking trail and we try to walk it several times a week.   Mark is still the chief coffee maker and we are still loving our pour-over coffee carafe.

After Thanksgiving we dug out our tub of Christmas decorations and spread a little Holiday cheer around the RV.  The Campground has a light competition each year but we are not competing.

There are pine trees on base as well but they don’t look like the pine trees we are used to seeing.  This tree that Mark is looking at had tiny little pine cones on it.

The next mod that Mark has been working on is installing a tank heater for the fresh water tank.  We aren’t in a hurry – no freezing temps here.  We do want to complete it before we leave in February, just in case we ever find ourselves in freezing weather again.   The first step of this install involved running a wire in the underbelly from the front to the back of the RV where the fresh water tank is located.  Step 1 is complete!

We finally got our U.S.A. map placed on the slide by the door to Old Glory.  As you can see we’ve been in quite a few states in the past 5 months.  What you don’t see are our Canadian stops: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Canada.

We see awesome sunsets here on a regular basis!

The campground laundromat (there are actually 2 laundry facilities in the FamCamp) is very convenient and only a dollar per load- so affordable compared to other laundromats we’ve used.

Mark installed reinforcements to our back cabinets. They were not made for all the bumping along – or we MAY have stored some heavier items back there. Lesson learned, and we are confident we can store anything in them now with no worries.

Mark also installed our 24″ TV in the bedroom.

The views continue to amaze us – so much beauty!

We hope to make a trip to Mt. Lemmon next week. It’s only an hour’s drive from Tucson. It averages 20 degrees cooler and they get snow so we are going on a warmer day.

I will be sharing some Instant Pot information in the next couple of days. We have had opportunity to try some new recipes while here.  Even if you aren’t living in an RV, an Instant Pot is a wonderful appliance!

Until next time, Merry Christmas from the Ballards’ RV Life!