Starting our Western Swing with Friends

We have left Colorado and started our swing through New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington, Idaho, Wyoming before coming back to Colorado.  Our plans include visiting friends and seeing this country's beautiful backyards in our western states.  The first part of our adventure will be visiting with friends we have known for a very long time.  We started our journey on May 1st driving to one of our favorite cities, Albuquerque, home of the world's most photographed event, the Annual Balloon festival and our friends Mike and Rita Kavanaugh.  As with so many of our friends, Mike and Rita welcome us as part of their family.  We have known them since 1986 and surprisingly we are still very close.  Our next stop, Tucson, usually a late fall destination, to visit with Tom and Maryann Graue.  We all met in Germany where Kris was born back in 1978.  If you follow our blog, you might remember that we mentioned that it was Maryann (now a retired nurse)  who was responsible for sending George to the doctor for his sleep apnea which was the catalyst for discovering his throat cancer back in 2003.  We treasure all of our friends and enjoy every minute we get to spend with each and everyone of them.   We will be leaving Tucson on May 16th and drive to the San Diego area to see several friends including a young lady who was stationed with Pat in Turkey in the early '70s, a fellow firefighter from our time in Germany who also vacationed with us on the ski slopes of Austria in the mid '80s , and we hope to get together with George's classmate from high school who is RV camping near San Diego.  After San Diego we will venture into the Mojave Desert to visit two other long time firefighter friends also from Germany in the 70s and 80s.  We plan on posting our blog as we progress up California, Oregon and Washington's coastlines and the side trips into some of the natural wonders of this beautiful land.

 

 

Mike and Rita with Pat in Old Town Albuquerque

Rita always cooks a great breakfast and always smiles

Mike is not saluting he thinks he is sweating while he watches Rita do all the work...Ok Mike did make the coffee!

Outside of the old church in old town Albuquerque with Mike. Rita and Pat

This park is just outside of old town Albuquerque and commemorates the cattle drives of 

 early New Mexico 

Not a bad landing spot for our Tucson visit, the desert flowers are still in bloom.  The weather has been great for our visit with temps in the low 80s (the average is in the 90s for this time of year).  Pat is taking advantage of the sunshine to enhance her tan.

Seems Tom likes to cook breakfast so we let him cook breakfast twice for us.  Are we just moochers?

One of the best things about visiting Tucson, we get to see Tom and Maryann's miracle baby, Emme.  She was a preemie and at two years old still weighs less than 20 pounds.  As you can see she is already a Buckeye fan even though her granddad is an Arizona Wildcat season ticket holder.

 

Oh, Thanks Maryann!!!!! 

 I am sure you can think of a few captions for this photo but Tom and I really were fixing his door sweep. 

This might be a fitting picture to say "The End"

 

Our newest trip has just started and we will be on the road for a least two and half months visiting the backyards of the west coast but we already know that if the rest of our trip is like the first couple of weeks.....we are going to have some fun!  Although we will miss our Holly, Kasey, Karsten and their parents; we also know that we are a phone call, Skype, or Facetime away from talking and/or seeing them.  We hope all of our friends and family have a wonderful and safe summer.  If you live on the west coast be very careful we might be pointing our motorhome in your direction just to stop in and say "hello"!