Hey, Lookin' Good Fufi!

living.boondockingmexico@yahoo.com

I made up for yesterday's laziness by giving the trailer a good scrub and shine.  Croft is wondering where we will be going soon.  January 6th, we are booked for a month at an rv resort in Texas.

The purpose is two-fold.  One is to continue research on drop out rates in high schools and the other is to see just how frugal we can be while rving in the U.S.  The park we are staying at charges 189 for a one month special and it includes everything. 

One of my dreams is to travel in New Mexico state parks.  They offer a one year non-resident pass for 225 dollars a year.  That is roughly 18 dollars a month.  It only includes water but for an additional 4 dollars a day, you can hace electric.  So that makes the monthly total 138 dollars.  Now you can stay in a NM state park for up to three weeks before having to move on, so fuel savings are enormous.  Parks  in NM are fantastic and they cover dry desert to pine filled mountain parks.  (did I digress there?)

It isn't about being cheap, but to show that it can be done without suffering.  So off to Texas we will go to spend a month square dancing, playing shuffle board, and going to potlucks.   I love the snowbird crowd.  They may not take to us off the bat, but we have found after a few days we fit in.

Make a long story short and it may have been told before.  Back in 2000 we had purchased a new Trailmanor (boy do I miss that rv).  We didn't have a tow vehicle so we had it towed to an rv park in Mission, Tx.  We went up on weekends and had a good ole time.  However, no one in the park would talk to us.  Weeks went by, months went by and not a word.   We really felt like outcasts. 

Then one day, our neighbor Virginia was hanging clothes up on her line behind their fifth wheel.   She smiled at me and I smiled back and said hello.   Not a word.  Then all of a sudden she said, "Can I ask you a question?"  She asked what we did for a living.  When I told her we were teachers, she put her hand on her chest and with a sigh of relief said, "thank god, everyone thinks you guys are drug dealers".  Turns out, we were coming up on weekends, we had a black Pathfinder with black tinted windows (I mean really black), and Mexican plates.   We were only there two days a week and then we would take off to head back home always arriving to the park late on Friday and out early on Sunday.

After that the word was out and we became known as "the boys" from Mexico.  It ended up to be a good beginning to rving in the RGV.