Sorry it’s been a while since we last posted. We had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year holiday visit with our granddaughters. We attended the traditional Christmas activities with Cole’s family – Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas day activities at his parent’s house, family coming over to Cole and Elizabeth’s house on Christmas Eve to swap presents and have brunch, and so on.

One thing we didn’t get to do was a winter activity. We had planned on heading out somewhere to go snow sledding or tubing for the day between Christmas and New Year’s Day. We waited a bit too late to look for tickets, as everyone else had the same idea. We did get to go to the YMCA and swim, though. They have a fairly new YMCA with really nice pool facilities.

We flew back “home” on New Year’s Day, arriving late in the evening. David came to pick us up and bring us back to the trailer, spending a couple nights with us before we packed up to head down to Florida, where we will be spending the month of January. Malcolm is working from the trailer this week.

We are looking at changing up our blog format and content just a bit this year. You’ll notice a lack of “Current Location” indication at the top of the blog posts. Location information will now solely be posted on our 2016 Travel Page. For the time being, at least, this information will be less “real-time” and will generally be updated after we leave someplace. We might change this at a later time.

The Year in Review

2015 was our third year of full-time RV travel and it was probably the most unpredictable. We lived in three different trailers during the year. Of course, our traffic accident in September was a bit of a game changer. Fallout from that incident will affect us probably most of this year, as well.

Our previous trailer is now in the hands of Lippert Industries at one of their repair facilities. They are going to do a thorough inspection of the damage and let the insurance company know if they can fix it or not. If they do, we’ll be putting the trailer up for sale.

A passenger in the van we ran into has filed a personal injury suit that includes Malcolm as a defendant. State Farm has already retained a lawyer on our behalf and is pretty much handling everything for us. They are confident we have nothing to worry about.

As can be seen in the sidebar on the blog, we traveled a mere 18 miles more in 2015 than we did in 2014. This number would have been quite a bit higher had we not been sidelined by the accident (we only count miles that we pull the trailer). We also visited the same number of states in 2015 that we did in 2014, though not the same 22 states.

We had our share of excitement, of course. Two different bearing failures in the same week on our first trailer was a challenge. Fortunately, nothing terribly bad happened in either case, especially considering that during the second incident the grease in the hub caught fire. The traffic accident is something we hope we never have to go through again, but we are grateful that neither one of us was injured. Being chased out of Lake Chelan State Park campground due to nearby forest fires was also a bit exciting.

We changed things up a bit the first of 2015 by staying south and traveling out to California and back during the winter months. Otherwise, most of the rest of the year was typical travel patterns for us. We still haven’t traveled to the northeast part of the US.

The Upcoming Year

We’re staying south again for winter. This year, instead of traveling west across the southern states, we’re hanging out in Florida for the month of January. Malcolm plans on working most all of February at locations unknown as of yet (probably Alabama and maybe Nashville, weather depending). In March, we celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary by flying out to Hawaii for 10 days.

Most of the rest of our travel year isn’t set at this point. We might do more impromptu traveling instead of having everything planned out in advance. We will be making our annual pilgrimage to Lake Chelan in August as well as visiting the family in Washington the rest of the month.

We’re thinking of doing more sightseeing in the western states on the way out west and after visiting in Washington. We also might finally get some of the New England states knocked out this summer. It should be interesting.