Wednesday January 12, 2011-Rayford Crossing RV Resort

Here I am again, playing catch-up...

As you know, I am on the entertainment committee here at Rayford. I volunteered to host games and cards both in the afternoon and in the evenings, but so far, no one has come out to play. A month ago or so, Dana and Jimmy came down but all we did was talk about New Year eve, so that doesn't count. I was pretty bummed by no one coming out to play but realized that everyone is busy with their own projects and I probably hadn't done as good a job as I could have at advertising it. At any rate, I have two more dates of games and cards on the schedule before we leave for the valley on the 23rd.

Last Friday, we took Reta with us to meet Ted and Donna at the El Chapparo mexican restaurant for supper. Reta's husband Jim was in Phoenix AZ so we took her out to eat with us. We all returned to the park and Reta went home while the other four of us went to play bingo. You know how I've whined about losing the rigged games?Well, guess what? I won two of the five games tonight! Maybe it was my new friend Keith's calling the numbers. Keith is a retired "Mountie" of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which gives us a lot to talk about, recounting our glory days of being cops...

The weather has been very mild this winter so far until this week when an arctic mass moved in and dropped the temperatures-a lot! We have only had a few nights in the 30's but Tuesday night we had a low of 26. It was so bad that both parks turned the water off at 6 o'clock to keep the lines from freezing. It turned out to be a non-event and no one had any damage.

Some of you may remember that I had scheduled a trip up to the Foretravel motorhome plant in Nacogdoches to take their factory tour. I and several of the guys from the coffee group were all ready to go when I got a message from the factory that all of their salespeople would be out at one of the huge RV shows this week, so we had to cancel our trip. We will reschedule it for later.

There was a large rally of old '70 model GMC motorhomes that came into the park. Melissa had called me and asked if I could help them out in the office by escorting the rigs in when they arrived. I checked my schedule and calendar and found that I did have time to help out, so after I took Stella to work, I came back and began escorting these very nice folks to their sites. They are a very friendly group and we should have a fine time with them. Jim got bored and came over to help me, so we rode around the park on the golf cart, helping people find their sites and visiting.

We got a good group to go out to eat at Double Dave's Pizza. Since the park water was turned off again, we thought we'd give the cook a night off since they couldn't clean up after. What a thoughtful bunch of guys we are! We all had a fine time together, and it gave me a chance to sit down with Keith and exchange a couple of cop stories.

Stella and I are getting excited about our upcoming trip to Mission. We will see many of our old friends down there, but will probably be able to skip a trip across the border into Mexico this time. When we went over in September, we bought enough medicines to last, but we will check before we go to make sure. We have some good events planned with our Heartland friends, a potluck dinner at Retama Village and the next day, another dealer open house at the Ron Hoover dealership in Donna. If you remember, we hosted this last year at the same location and had a great time. We are looking forward to this year's event and will let you know about it later. We are planning to go to the Sweetheart Rally in Kerrville after we are finished in the valley. This will be our first time to go to this rally, which is put on by some people we know. We are expecting good turnouts for both of these and will tell you more about them when we are done.

That's about all there is to report for now.

So long.