Opening Weekend!

We are officially open at Jellystone Campground of Estes Park!  The weather is cooperating (in that it's not currently snowing)!  A little on the cool side still, but that is to be expected.  We look forward to a fun summer with all our workamping buddies!

Happy May Day

May 1st in the Rocky Mountains (this year) is very snowy! About 10 inches overnight and we're supposed to have snow all day and all night! Who knows what it will look like tomorrow! The campground opens in nine days! (No outside work will be accomplished today!)

Spring 2013

So much for keeping everyone up to date on our travels! It's April and we are already at Jellystone Campground in Estes Park, Colorado for our summer job. I will post some pictures of the snowfall that started yesterday and is continuing today! We had another gate guard job in South Texas until March 8th, when we left and headed to San Angelo to visit with my sisters and their families and celebrate my birthday. I had a great time and was really happy to see everyone! We then headed to Las Cruces to meet my parents and join the RV club for a couple of days. Then it was off to Alamogordo to visit more family and friends. We went to White Sands, Inn of the Mountain Gods outside Ruidoso, Cloudcroft, and got to see everyone I wanted to see. Even had a Sunday afternoon get-together with high school friends that I hadn't seen in decades! We spent almost a month in Albuquerque waiting for the weather to clear long enough in Colorado for us to head up and start work. We finally just left and headed north. We arrived at Jellystone on Friday the 18th and had two beautiful days of weather before the snowfall started yesterday. We're off today because there's too much snow to do much of anything and we are supposed to have great weather the rest of the week! It's great to be back up here and to see friends and start back to work. Hope everyone is doing well!

Happy 2013!

2013 has found us in Texas working as gatekeepers at oil rig sites. Our first stint was five weeks long and we learned a lot about the oil business (not nearly enough). We had to leave the site to make a quick trip to Albuquerque for a doctor's appointment and to visit my parents (and pick up all our mail)! We left our motorhome in Texas at a Corps of Engineers campground at Canyon Lake. I'm attaching a couple of photos of the lake. This afternoon it is 72 degrees, slight wind, and the lake is beautiful. There were more campers over the weekend, but they've left and we're one of only four campers on our entire loop.

We will contact the office we work out of tomorrow morning to let them know we're back in the area and are ready to work. We enjoyed a brief respite from the gate keeping duties and all the noise of the oil business (and the freeway noise and trains). Now we're ready to go back and earn some more money. Hope this finds everyone healthy and happy in the New Year!

Next Adventure

Wayne and I are currently in southwest Texas (current nighttime temperature is 60 degrees). We are working as gateguards for an oil company. We have our motorhome parked inside the gate and we log in/out every vehicle 24-hours a day, seven days a week. We sleep, eat, and work in shifts. We have only been here six days, so our schedule is still a work in progress. The company we work for provides a generator, a tank of water, and a crew that comes around once a week to dump our tanks. The oil company is drilling two wells on our site using fracking to get to the oil quicker. I'm learning a lot about the whole process because I ask different workers questions about what they're doing. Everyone is polite and answers lots of questions. The hardest part is getting used to all the noise! It doesn't stop either. I took a couple of pictures the first day that I will try to post in here. Ziva isn't sure about all this. She likes that we sleep in shiffz, because she can stay in bed longer. The dust was bad the first few days, but then it rained a little Friday morni.g and packed it down. We have been lucky with the weather so far, but I am sure we will get cold weather soon. We are located off I-35 half-way between San Antonio and Laredo. We have to drive 25 miles for a grocery store and the nearest Wal-Mart is one of the originals and very small. We are enjoying it so far because it is something new and different (did I mention we make good money doing it?). Apparently I can't post pictures from my tablet.

Hurry Up and Wait

Still in Albuquerque -- our initial round of appointments, fixing things, etc., has now resulted in us waiting around for pieces and parts to arrive. Wayne is in the process of trying to install running boards on the Ford Explorer. Never as easy a job as the directions would like you to believe! He has one done and will install the other one tomorrow. Today is a day of kicking back and watching football (and maybe some World Series baseball). Hope everyone is doing well and getting geared up for Halloween!

(Campsite across from us at Jellystone Park)

Update

It's been awhile since I posted, so here we go (lots of pictures). We are now in Albuquerque for a couple of weeks (we've been here one week so far). It's catch up with all the "chores" we have to do while in the city: doctors appointments, flu shots, voting, trading Jeep in for a 2009 Ford Explorer (love it), replacing old, dead washer with a new, more efficient one, renew driver's licenses, get mail and various other items. It's been a busy start to our visit, but now we are just waiting for all the various things that have been ordered to arrive before we decide what to do next!

We left Jellystone a few days early because the weather was turning cold and we were dangerously low on propane for heating -- and we got out before the serious snow started!

We hope to be back next summer along with all the other Workampers from this past summer!

Wayne had a great checkup with the doctor last week and everyone was happy with the weight loss and blood sugar levels, and all those other levels they track. He will be doing a sleep study this next week to see why he has so much trouble sleeping at night. We had a nice visit with my parents before they left for Branson, Missouri. My Mom turned 80 yesterday and is still going strong!

I've been enjoying the sunsets (and one great sunrise) since being back in New Mexico; that is one thing I miss about NM when we're gone. So for now we're just hanging out and waiting. Hope everyone is doing well and we will let you know where we are headed next (once we decide, of course)!