Thanksgiving

Sometimes it’s hard to be thankful for your circumstances. The week before Thanksgiving we had the RV and the Honda in different shops simultaneously. I was also experiencing the strongest fibro flare-up since Florida. But, the breakdowns led us here and forced us to stop long enough to have a wonderful Thanksgiving pot-luck dinner with a very nice bunch of folks at RV Docs in Las Cruces, New Mexico. A nice, outgoing lady named Eileen brought us all together. It was a very enjoyable way to spend Thanksgiving since we couldn’t be back east with our families. Ed even got to meet and play with another home-schooled boy who’s traveling full-time with his family. So, I’m thankful for the hassles and headaches we faced earlier because we had some great experiences and seem to have finally worked out the latest bugs in the two vehicles.

Spending a week in Las Cruces, I got to know the area well enough to do my annual Black Friday shopping run here. You have to know the locations of the stores or it throws your timing off. Fortunately, the crowds were nothing like back in Florida and so far removed from what we used to face in the Delaware Valley that it’s hard to believe what we used to endure. There were no shoving/yelling matches, line jumpers or injuries – a pleasant change of pace! I stayed up through the night plotting my mission. I got a relatively late start though (didn’t leave until 5:30 am) because I was attempting to avoid the stores by shopping online. The only store that had what I wanted online was Staples but their site slowed to a crawl as soon as 6 am Eastern arrived. I finally gave up and headed for Target. Even though I only arrived 15 minutes prior to their opening at 6 am, I got in and out of the store with everything on my list by 6:14! Then I hit Staples and managed to snag the two most important items I had intended to order from their website. The plus to shopping in-store was an additional $20 off coupon the website wouldn’t accept (assuming it ever got around to actually taking the order). I had a very successful run that culminated in a trip to Pep Boys, snagging a really sweet electric scooter for Ed. Normally, I wouldn’t be putting that up on the blog but we faced two problems with this gift – 1) it’s far too big and heavy to ship to Philly and back for Christmas, 2) there’s no place to hide it on the RV. So, we gave it to Ed as an early present. His old scooter broke back in Mississippi so he was really happy with the upgrade! I was really happy with the Black Friday price. The electric scooter actually cost less than what his manual scooter cost a few years ago! I was back at the RV by 10:30 am with everything except a couple items KB Toys ran out of before I could get there. I took a four hour nap in the afternoon then we got some dinner and went back to the mall. I read EB Games was clearing out used PC games for 75% off this weekend and we got three decent older games for about seven bucks. We stopped back into KB Toys to see if I had missed anything in the early rush. Amazingly, they had restocked the shelves with a key sale item for one of the cousins and there were two left at 5 minutes until closing. We quickly checked the ad and it didn’t say the sale ended at 11 am or Noon (like most). So, we ended up buying our last Black Friday doorbuster item right at 9 pm. Definitely a first!

Tomorrow we’re off to Tucson for a couple days before we work our way up to Las Vegas. There’s only a little more than two weeks left before we see everyone back east and we’re very excited about that!