Well, Fevered Brain, I must have sobered up from those cocktails in Santa Fe by now. I can't believe I haven't blogged since August but tempus fugit. I have pretty much forgotten the road trip back to BC from NM...it was a long way and seems like long ago. I started that last post at some point but neglected to fill in all the blanks and publish it.
It's raining today, a perfect day to catch up on this blog.
Last September, Meg's powers of manifesting were in tiptop form when we once again got a call from the Pacific National Exhibition informing us that we won another PNE Prize car...this time a red 2012 Prius V.
I had always wanted to drive a Prius because they are so economical and it seemed like a wise, peppy, eco-friendly car to drive (51 mpg). We exchanged the red V for a spiffy deep blue one. It had lots of bells and whistles - solar panels in the roof for cooling the car, back up camera with a monitor in the dashboard, great graphics to watch power generation and consumption. The problem was we had just imported a 2004 Subaru Baja Turbo from the US of A a week before our windfall. Turns out, for me the Baja was way more fun to drive - I definitely prefer a stick shift to an automatic - and it is so gutsy. After 2 weeks of tootling around in the Prius, Meg listed it on Craigslist and it was another notch for our vehicle board.
Speaking of vehicles, we sold our C class TravelAire RV, as well. It seemed too big for us. It sleeps 6. Nice vehicle but not the right fit.
In October, Meg found a 2000 Rialta, flew over to Edmonton to pick it up and drove it over the Rockies just ahead of the first snowstorm of the season. It has a very comfortable layout that suits our needs. We took it down to Oregon in the fall for its initial outing. We dubbed her 'Riley', as in "the Life of..". She is a keeper as she is a sipper of gasoline at ~22 MPG. A better fit...
That cold/flu bug that made the rounds over the fall and winter kept hunting me down and attacking ever 2 weeks or so. I was never healthy enough to get a flu shot. Meg decided that in order to survive the season, I would have to see some sunshine and warm weather so, in February, we packed up Riley and our golf clubs and headed down the I-5 to California. We almost didn't make over the Siskiyou Pass. Meg was overwhelmed by a virulent bug that sidelined her to the bed in the back. Being the perpetual navigator I was not too keen on driving but wanted to make it over the pass before an anticipated snowstorm. We managed to make it to Medford, OR to overnight it before the flu bug started to bounce around in my innards. Feeling like death-warmed-over the next morning, I focused on getting over the pass, into California and into the first rest stop we could find to sleep and recoup a little. Meg rallied the next day, more or less, and got us down the rest of the I-5, through gridlock in LA/Pasadena and into Hemet.
Hemet is about an hour west of the Palm Springs/Palm Desert area. It's got a few well equipped RV parks and plenty of cheap golf courses. We found some fine courses with 18-holes of golf plus a cart for under $15. It was great...and the colds disappeared. Mind you, we did run into snow flurries one morning in Yucaipa, CA...about 30 minutes west of Hemet. It wasn't super hot but there was sunshine and golf! 
We made another outing to Port Townsend in March to join the RVW group. It was a fun weekend but we encountered an unseasonable snowstorm at the ferry dock in Coupeville, WA and slipped and slid through the parking lot. Port Townsend is so picturesque and full of quaint diners and shoppes. We took a wooden steamboat tour of the harbour.
Last month I won a weekend for two to the 'Passport to Woodenville' . It included two nights at the very nice Hilton Garden Inn in Bothell, WA and a two-day passport to sample wine at over 30 local wineries. The hotel drove us to the warehouse district where about half of the wineries have distribution centers and sipping stations. What a blast! and, Wow!, did we ever sip some wonderful reds. Not being much of a white wine aficionado, I was surprised to taste some palatable white wines, too. We even sampled some mighty smooth vodkas and some brutal bourbons. The next day we visited the remaining wineries around and about Woodenville. It's hard to say but we soon both hit our limit. It's a matter of survival - sip, swirl and spit!
That's probably enough of a catch up for now...
I'll be baaaack...!!
