Good morning! Or evening, or afternoon, or whatever time it is when you’re reading this. It’s been a hot minute since I wrote a blog; I missed last week’s because two of our blog readers were here in person! Jeremiah’s parents! So, we decided we’d get some holiday celebrating in.
Holiday one: Thanksgiving
Last week was Thanksgiving in our Home on Wheels. Technically, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday of every November, but the idea that we have a dictated day to be grateful seems a little funny. So, we had Thanksgiving dinner on a Tuesday at the beginning of the month, the day after Jeremiah’s parents arrived to 25F degree weather in Dallas Texas.
We cook relatively normally in our home on wheels, which I’ve mentioned before, but if you think I was going to cook a whole turkey in our convection oven, you are sorely mistaken. That poor turkey wouldn’t have ever cooked all the way, and it would have been smashed on every side just to fit it. Instead, we cooked a turkey breast, substituted out mashed potatoes for mashed cauliflower, and had a couple of sides. Then, we sat crouched around our pull-out table, sitting on chairs that we’ve store in our home but hadn’t used until just now. The HOW feels plenty big when it’s two of us, but eating dinner with 4 reminded me we don’t actually have a “normal” American-sized home.
We spent the week hanging out. We played gin rummy and board games, ate amazing barbecue in a tiny town, and ran errands to fix our hydrohot. (Of course, now that it’s fixed, I’m sure the weather will get warm again. I’m all for that though.) It felt like winter vacation to me, reminding me of the things I did around the holidays with my family while growing up.
On to holiday two …”Christmas” Lights
On Thursday, the night before Jeremiah’s parents flew back to warmer Portland, we decided that viewing Christmas Lights was in order. After all, might as well kick off some Christmas festivities. A tiny town about 45 minutes from the RV park boasted a Christmas lights event.
We went to the haunted porcelain doll house place where there were thousands of wood-cut outs of painted anthropomorphized animals. There were about a dozen sheds with glass fronts displaying various scenes; in one, a lifesize Elvis stood next to a microphone and they blasted “Blue Christmas.” Another scene was tiny rooms where old dolls sat, ranging from cabbage patch to porcelain. The entire mile-and-a-half loop was lit with bright Christmas lights, but it needed some modernization. In the daylight, it would have been interesting, but with the constantly shifting music and strange cut outs, it was not an event I would ever visit again. But! I’m already looking for some other christmas light festivities to go see, so I’m not a total grinch. That was just not my cup of tea.
Holiday 3: Thinking of 2020
Now that we’ve got those first two holidays out of the way, we can start celebrating the new year early! Just kidding. We’re not going that far. However, we have started brainstorming what we want our next year and our next decade to look like. We haven’t figured it out quite yet. So, we’ll pack our stuff up, hook up the car to our motorhome, and head back west to be with some friends for a couple months as we figure things out.
The joy of living on the road is we get to choose where we want to go. Right now, California in December with some of our closest friends sounds pretty awesome. I’m hoping we can find a Christmas Lights display on the way somewhere between Dallas Texas and San Francisco. This light show in Tucson looks beautiful!
What about you? Are you celebrating any holidays yet? Are there any holiday things you know of that we have to visit as we drive back out west? Let us know!
