Life in the Slow Lane - Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta

I'm going to jump ahead for a few days. I opened the blog up to add our current trip and realized I hadn't finished the other one! I am so sorry to those that have been reading. I continue to have issues uploading photos. It appears all of my files are too big and I can't figure out how to resize them without going through a long and tedious process. I will get back and finish the trip in a few days, but for now I want to move ahead.

Anywho! Today we dusted off Lucille's traveling shoes and hit the road! We are headed to Albuquerque to meet up with the rally and GO TO THE BALLOON FIESTA....OLE!

We were both a little sad to end our seven week adventure. Once we got back I sent an email to the rally organizers and asked if there was ever movement on the waiting list. He suggested I send in my registration just in case there was, so I did. I was so excited a few weeks later when I received an email saying we got in!

I think the hubs was pretty happy thinking we wouldn't get in. The weekend is dangerously close to the opening of hockey season. He is a season ticket holder and NEVER misses a game. In fact, our AS ownership pack includes a clause saying I agree not to travel at a time when home games are played. (He has since given me a schedule of approved travel dates when the team will be on a road trip. ) He was a good sport when we got in and we realized we could plan our return trip to get home in plenty of time for the opening game.

So, we had to kick our preparation in high gear. We didn't need much...except a generator...or two!

We also needed some way to identify ourselves amongst the pack of 200 AS. I decided we needed a small Dallas Stars garden flag, which was a good idea until I discovered that they don't have one out in the new logo. Time for Plan B.

Plan B came to me a few weeks later when I found an idea on Pinterest. I love Pinterest and it is a total time waster until you need to find an idea pronto! I decided to make a sign that says my forum user name out of old license plates. Problem with this plan is that the flea market where I could get these license plates had taken place the week before! The next weekend Daughter 2 and I went to a local architectural salvage yard and stumbled upon a plethora of old license plates!

The hubs ended up helping me with the sign. Carpenter skills are not my forte. We ended up finding a Stars flag an hour away so plan A was resurrected. One morning we made the road trip and got the flag AND found a way to hang the username sign as well.

Now all we needed was to mount the numbers by copying the plexiglass idea one user had shared with me on the forums. I know, it's not mounted but I just didn't want to alter Lucille's shiny new appearance. I started to mount the numbers......and gave up. Daughter 1 and I decided the hubs would be much better at that than us. He later took one look at it and asked me to find a sign shop to copy the numbers on one sheet.

Our original plan was to leave Dallas very early on Thursday morning (tomorrow) and drive straight through. The weather report came on and predicted rain for our travel day. The hubs was at a hockey game and I mentioned this wrinkle to him when he got home. He immediately commented that the rain would slow us down. So, he slept on it, literally, and decided we should get as far as we could today (Wednesday), even if we left late.

We got almost everything done except packing our clothes and the odds and ends on Tuesday. I'm glad we did because Wednesday morning I had to find a sign shop! The sign shop made the numbers before noon and we finished packing.

One of our labs, Darci, realized we were leaving and followed us around all morning. She was so close she ran into us several times when we stopped. She was really tugging at my heart strings. We decided not to bring dogs this time because it is our first rally and we would be boon docking and not have our usual white noise for them to drown out the campground noises. And, Darci, is convinced that all flying things, including the moon, are alien space invaders.

But, at the last minute we decided to bring her anyway! She jumped in the car with a big smile on her face and absolutely did not care where we were going as long as she was going with us. I got her things packed quickly, including a fun collar for the dog parade, and we were off!

It is now seven hours later and we are in Amarillo for the night. We had a lot of traffic in Fort Worth. Darci had the entire back seat to herself and slept....on the floor...on her bed....just like she did on our Canada trip.

We let her out twice for a potty break and both times she sprinted to the grass area and took care of business right away. One stop, outside of Amarillo, was at a really nice rest area. She sprinted over to the pet area as I looked at the sign. One sign marked the pet area and right below it was a sign telling you to look out for rattle snakes. Yes, rattle snakes. She was so busy pulling me about I couldn't look! She is a trained hunting dog and has had snake avoidance training as well. She has also had the rattle snake vaccine. One of my nicknames for her is snake charmer because she has alerted me more on several occasions. Once I remembered all of that I calmed down and we had a nice walk.

We are staying at a different campground this time, just to try something different. We are at Fort Amarillo. It is very nice but they are building the dog area and it is very much a construction zone. Camp set up went okay. I was a bit rusty and hooked the water up in the wrong place but we caught it quickly. We had a snack for dinner.We are happily tucked into Lucille and getting very excited about the day tomorrow.

Tomorrow we are headed to Enchanted Trails in Albuquerque. Since our trip we joined a local WBCCI group and some of those folks will be going to the rally. We should also see Karl from the rally we ran into in Montana. There are also several forum folks we hope to meet. But, of course, all of this might not materialize and we could be all alone and not know or meet anyone. I really hope not. But, if these people do want to find us, we have signage!

Oh, we just got a report from a Dallas Stars season ticket holder event that the girls attended for us. Daughter 1 wore her Whistler shirt and two players commented that they liked it. She is over the moon!