Travels with Cathy and Larry: Greetings from Orlando Florida

Below is a copy of our Christmas Letter which has been mailed to many, but not all of you. It will update anyone who has not heard of our plans and it also relates our travels this past year. At the end are just a couple of photos I took from our patio.

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It is hard to believe another year has passed since we last wrote our year-end letter, but it has and so here we go! Big changes for us were made during the year and many of you know of them. I will hold that for later. First I want to recap our travels and experiences for the end of 2013 and into 2014.

Since 2014 would be the year we needed to be in South Dakota to renew our driver licenses, and we would have to be there before our birthdays in the month of June, we decided to spend the winter months in Texas to put us in the approximate Longitude but still be able to avoid the cold weather. Our travels for the year would cover 7,500 miles.

We enjoy driving in the autumn through the Shenandoah Valley along Interstate 81 as the fall colors are usually still vibrant in November and this year was very pretty. Over the years of travel and on this route we have established several regular stops at convenient intervals and we used them before stopping for a few days in Tennessee at the Escapees RV Park there. Our route to Texas from there included stops in Chattanooga TN, Gadsden and Tuscaloosa AL, Hattiesburg MS, Baton Rouge and Lafayette LA and Beaumont TX before getting to another Escapees Park in Livingston TX.

Leaving there on November 25, we traveled to several Thousand Trails Preserves around the Houston area and then to Port O'Connor on the Gulf Coast where we spent 6 weeks trying to stay warm and enjoying locally caught shrimp. Port O'Connor calls itself "The End of the Road" and it truly is as far as one can go before running into the Gulf. Leaving there March 3rd we utilized our membership in Thousand Trails and stayed in the system until April 9th. Our stops were for one or two weeks at each of 5 Preserves more or less surrounding Houston. Wildlife is abundant in most of the parks which we enjoy. Our stop at Lake Medina afforded us time to visit Cathy's brother, Bob and his family, who live in the San Antonio suburbs. We enjoyed some local BBQ and Pizza and took a day trip to visit Cathy's cousins, the Bogarts, in Kerrville, which is about an hour drive.

Now heading north our first stop was in Norman Oklahoma at beautiful Lake Thunderbird State Park where we planned to stay for 3 weeks, and it is a good thing we did! One morning while doing nothing more than reading or watching the news, Larry had a frightening experience. In an instant the sight in his right eye was gone. It was as though he was looking through a snow globe filled with dark particles. A hurried call to an ophthalmologist in Norman resulted in a visit to the office where the local doctor determined that I needed to see a retina specialist who as luck would have it was on his regular visit to the local office. Long story short, I had suffered a torn retina and required surgery. The surgery was done in Oklahoma City on a Friday, very early in the morning and we had a followup on Saturday morning. The surgery stitched the tear in the retina and included a vitrectomy to replace all the gunky fluid in my eye with fresh saline solution. A bubble of air is intentionally inserted as well to apply gentle pressure to keep the retina pressed against the optic nerve while healing.

We arrrived in South Dakota in time to get our licenses renewed and passed the vision exam easily. The surgeon in OK had me see a colleague of his in SD for a followup appointment and healing was well along. Our plans then took us on a 3 week jaunt across Minnesota with stops in the prairie southwest part of the state to places only a stone's throw from the Canadian Border and ultimately to a stop in Duluth on Lake Superior. From there we took day trips to the northeastern extremes of the state and enjoyed visiting Wolf and Bear Preserves in the village of Ely. We had to adjust our schedule a couple of times while in MN as a persistent rain threatened floods where we were supposed to be. But to our good fortune the rains made our stop in Big Falls memorable as the water was extremely high and fast. Locals told us it is rarely as boistrous as we witnessed as we were parked for the night at the City Park alongside the Falls.

We then drove to Wisconsin to visit Cathy's dear friend Diana Sullivan and her family over the 4th of July period. We enjoyed picnics at the campground lake and other gatherings with them. We then took six weeks driving from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania taking advantage of our Thousand Trails membership with week long stays at 4 campgrounds in Indiana and Ohio before reaching the Pittsburgh suburbs. We stayed 3 weeks there visiting Larry's family and to attend his 55th High School Reunion. Sadly one of the organizers succumbed to a long fight with cancer just hours before the Reunion so it put a somber note on the evening. And we recently received word that another classmate who attended the get-together has passed away also from cancer. Too many of us are leaving too soon.

After we said our goodbyes in Western Pa, we drove to Hershey to begin setting up our "Summer Home" in the form of a Keystone Montana Fifth Wheel RV. It was delivered and parked by the dealer and we were granted permission from the manager of the Thousand Trails Hershey Preserve to park our motor home in the adjacent site so we could easily transfer some of our summer things to the Montana.

From there we drove the familiar route to Florida via Interstate 81 to Knoxville TN and then Interstate 59 to Florida where we are parked in our "Winter Quarters" at the Thousand Trails Orlando Preserve. As most of you already know we have decided to settle down and curtail our travel as the effort to pack up and go has become too much to do for both of us. So we will commute between here and Hershey as the seasons change from winter to summer and back again.

We hope everybody has a great holiday season with all the joys imaginable. For those of you who do not receive my email blog announcements and are interested in reading more about our travels including photos, go to http://travelswithcathylarry.blogspot.com/

to view the posts since 2011. And there is one other item to note, our mail forwarding service in Sioux Falls moved to a larger facility and it has necessitated that we change our mailing address. So please note our new, permanent address: I will be a little cryptic here so the internet demons don't deluge our postal mail with offers too good to be true!

Our new street address is 3916 N. Potsdam Ave. 2501

and our new Zip Code is 57104.
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Thousand Trails Orlando

Each spot here has a bit of a planting area at the front entrance. Ours is a little sad looking and needs some TLC soon. There is a Tropical Hyacinth that is in need of fertilizer and some pruning, but it is valiantly trying to bloom as you can see. We think we will remove some small evergreen shrubs which seem to be mostly dead and replace them with heat resistant perrenials and use the Hyacinth as a backdrop.