We made it back to the U.S. without any problems.  Had to fly through Frankfurt, then nonstop from there to Denver.  It took quite awhile in Denver, mostly due to the size of the airport and then having to deal with Shadow coming into the country.  My dad picked us up from the airport and it was great seeing my folks after over a year of being on the boat.

Our plan is to borrow my brother’s car and drive up to Bonners Ferry to visit Jon, then head up to our place in B.C.   We will stay up there through mid-December and then head to Colorado for the holidays.

Late November

Having been home for awhile, we have agreed that it’s in our best interests to remain up here for a few months, extending our stay here and leaving the boat on the hard outside of Rome.  So we’ve started looking for a small SUV to borrow, since my brother will be wanting his car back at some point.

Christmas

We drove down a few days before through the most awful road conditions imaginable.  We each drove a vehicle, as we have our new used Honda CRV as well as my brother’s vehicle.  We shouldn’t have been on the road, and the authorities finally agreed that the road should be closed.  Of course, we were already on it so we didn’t have to stop!  Wow — lucky us!  We definitely were lucky, though, as we saw many wrecks and later heard that something like 17 people died on that stretch of road that day/night.  I got to my folks and crashed for a day to de-stress.

We drove down to my brother’s in Colorado Springs for Christmas.  The weather continued to work against us, so none of the rest of the family made it down (other than my nephew & his girlfriend) for the holidays.  We are heading out for Florida and will spend New Year’s Eve somewhere along the way.

31 December

We were driving down the road, and I saw a sign that said you had to go right to get to New Orleans or left to get to Mobile.  So I decided to ‘miss’ the turn for Mobile and pointed us towards New Orleans!  We got down there and there were all kinds of things going on for the bowl game.  The Georgia Bulldogs were playing (Robert’s mom’s team).  We went to a pep rally and had a great time wandering around town.  We located a hotel for a couple nights at a fair price; tried to locate some reasonably priced game tickets but no such luck.  We ended up being glad of that, as the day of the game was cold and nasty.  So we went out to eat and watched part of the game while there, then watched the rest of it and other bowl games in our room.