What do extended-time RVers do on Christmas day?  Pretty much what they would do at home, except for visiting/hosting family.  It got down to 33 degrees F overnight, so we had the spirit of winter if not the actual thing.  That was still above freezing and much better than the 9 degrees F in Howell, Michigan.  Linda put her knit cap on and went for a walk before breakfast.  With the way people are bundled up here she didn’t want to show off by walking without her hat.  We may not be overly concerned with fitting in, but there’s no reason to make people feel bad on Christmas day.  We both went for a couple of walks later in the day.  There are pictures of the RV resort throughout this post that do not necessarily relate the text.

This was our 7^th day on the road and as we are leaving Williston Crossings RV Resort tomorrow for a week we needed to do a load of laundry.  One of the Laundromat buildings is fairly close to our current site and even closer to our long-term site when we get back.  Like everything else here it was clean and well lit with commercial washers and dryers in good condition and all functioning properly.  I took care of the laundry after breakfast, as I would have done at home, while Linda started working on our holiday meal, as she would have done at home.  At some level life on the road is just life, and there’s a certain comfort in that, but with more variety of new experiences which is why people do it.  We have been determined from the beginning that our extended-time RVing would not be an extended vacation.  Although we plan to do plenty of sight-seeing while we are in Florida, so far we have been quite comfortable with just sitting in one place and relaxing.

Linda’s first culinary task was to make her vegan chocolate cake.  She had not packed vegetable oil, so she used avocado oil instead.  The batter (I got to clean the bowl) did not have any unusual taste, so we expected the cake to be very good when we finally had some for dessert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We turned on the dash radio and were able to tune in the Gainesville NPR station with a good strong signal even though the antenna is 20 miles away.  Not bad considering that our radio does not have an antenna at the moment!  It was removed as part of redoing the roof in 2011/12 and has not yet been replaced.  So at this point we have fast Wi-Fi, a good selection of over-the-air TV stations (including the PBS trio), and good radio signals (including NPR).  This place just gets better and better.

With our outstanding Wi-Fi we decided to try contacting our children using Facetime on our iPads.  We connected with our son and daughter-in-law first.  Our grand-daughter was having a late morning snack of teething pretzels and “freezy peasies” (frozen peas).  She seemed to recognize us and smiled and waved in-between gumming pretzels and peas.  She got very excited when our male cat, Jasper, wandered into the frame, so it was pretty clear that she recognized the images she was seeing.  Facetime is going to allow us to stay in touch with her development while we are here, which is very nice.  We then connected with our daughter and had a nice chat with her.  She was baking rolls for later today when she and her husband were getting together with her brother, his family, and a friend.

We bought a Tofurkey yesterday to have for our main dish today.  Linda had not tried to cook one in a convection/microwave oven before, and the cooking directions advised against microwaving it, so this was a bit of an experiment.  She made cranberry-orange relish yesterday from our remaining fresh cranberries.  Today she made a green salad which we ate an hour before our main mean.  She convection roasted the Tofurkey and it came out great.  While it was relaxing she microwaved a couple of yams and sautéed some asparagus spears to complete the side dishes.  We had a bottle of Early Season White Cranberry Wine from Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota to round out the meal.  Of the many non-grape wines available from Forestedge Winery, this is one of our favorites.

 

It may be Christmas day, but chores have to be done when they have to be done.  Even though we have a full-hookup site at the rally in Arcadia we wanted to leave Williston tomorrow with empty holding tanks and a full fresh water tank.  You never know if the facilities you’ve been promised will actually be functional when you arrive.  I attended to these tasks after dinner.

After an early evening stroll through the RV resort we had vegan chocolate cake with fresh strawberries for dessert.  As expected, the cake was excellent.