Ten things you may not know about Kevin and Ruth

We've been writing this blog for over five years now, and we've shared a lot of our personal day to day stories. But there are some things that you probably don't know. Some of them are important to who we are and how we came to be at this stage in our lives. Some of them are pretty random, and not important at all!

We have the best, most loyal readers ever!

Many of you have been with us since we started doing this in the fall of 2007, and we are grateful to have met quite a few of our readers. We have been treated so well by so many of you that when we get the opportunity to give back, we want to do whatever we can!

Busy relaxing.

Keeping busy while relaxing? Relaxing in between keeping busy? Either way, the day seems to fly by even though we aren't doing very much. We are happy not worrying about anything right now!

Cookies and pizza and homemade RV's!.

Now that we have a full tank of propane, Ruth can use the oven. Many RV's don't even come with a decent size oven, but Ruth really enjoys using ours. Yesterday afternoon, she made some gluten free chocolate chip cookies!

Sherman fired right up!

We've been running our fridge off electricity since we got here, because our propane tank was nearly empty. But propane is much cheaper and RV refrigerators are more efficient when switched over to "gas " mode. We could have had a propane truck come into the campground to fill us up, but Sherman has been sitting for more than six months and it would do him good to go for a drive.

We love market day!

We love going into the local Saturday market to pick up our fruits and veggies for the week. There's one popular stand where the guy adds everything up so quickly that you can't understand what he says. He pretty much sounds like an auctioneer!

Relaxing

Well, our first day of relaxing went very well!

We are getting right back into routine, and did our morning power walk around the perimeter of the property here. Ruth did eight laps which is 4 miles (6.5 kms) , and I did six laps, or 3 miles (4.8 kms). I also began doing some push ups and other arm/chest/back exercises.

Happy to be Home!

We left Zacatecas around 9:30am yesterday morning. We've done this exact drive before with the motorhome so we knew what to expect and where to turn. However we had to go through the city of Aguascalientes and there are several ways to do that. The route we had done with Sherman last year was terrible and full of potholes, so we chose a different route. Got lucky, because it was all fresh, brand new pavement!

The City of Zacatecas

Thanks for all of your comments and concern everybody, we're totally fine. We had an email last night from the Comandante at the municipal police saying that the photo I emailed her was going to be very helpful. So maybe they will catch the bad guys yet!

Mugged!

Okay, sorry for the dramatic title but it's true, we did get mugged today.

We're both fine, and the bad guys got away with very little. In hindsight, we think we did almost everything right so we're going to tell you the story in the hope that someone else can learn from what we did. We also learned from the experience, so we are trying to take away some good from something that is not so good!

Monterrey to Zacatecas

We were trying to figure our route from Chris and Jaun's place in Santiago. They live south of Monterrey, and we didn't want to deal with the traffic in both Monterrey and Saltillo. But there's this narrow road that goes through the mountains, and we figured the little blue car was up to the task. Are we ever glad we did!

Some nice views of Monterrey

Juan was working yesterday, but Chris took us up to the mountains surrounding Monterrey. There's a national park called Chipinque Parque Ecologico and Chris had been there many years ago and wanted to see what it was like now.

The strange things you see on a hike!

We haven't gone for a good hike for quite a while, so Chris and Juan took us to the nearby La Estanzuela State Park yesterday. But first, we had to have a good breakfast. Ruth made some of her good maiz flour pancakes, and we had a tin of real Canadian maple syrup to use with them. That, and a couple of slices of bacon and fresh squeezed orange juice made for a great start to the day!

Hello, Mexico!

We wanted to cross the border early, and Mexico had a time change a week before the United States so the border station didn't open until 9:00am Texas time, although it was 8:00am in Mexico. We did one last stop at the Walmart to pick up some gluten free Chex cereal for Ruth, and then we did the 18 mile (28 km) drive northwest to the Columbia bridge crossing.

We're at the Mexico border

We did the drive from San Antonio to Laredo yesterday, and we're ready to cross the border. In fact, we'll be doing that a couple of hours from now!