Vanchella Vagabonds

By Chris Day 4: Ozona, Texas to Deming, New Mexico, 446 miles New Mexico! Exciting for three reasons. First, we are finally out of Texas! Second, we've never been to New Mexico before, so we get to add another state to our list , bringing up to 25. Third, we entered a new time zone and gained an hour. One neat thing we wanted to share about Ozona was what they had done for their 2020 graduates. Each graduate had a light pole banner with their graduation picture and a congratulations. Very nice. The morning drive was much better than yesterday. Since it was so rural, there were hardly any other cars, so when they came zooming up at 90-100 mph, it wasn't a bother as they passed. We stopped in a small town called Van Horn for a delicious Tex-Mex lunch , and then continued on to El Paso. Here's a little scenery from this portion of Texas: We saw several dust devils on this portion of the drive, that was a first! Dust storms are a potential hazard along this route ...

By Chris With our AirBnB contract ending, we decided to head to the West Coast to ride out the upcoming months until (hopefully) we can (safely) get back to our retirement travel plans. We had intended to do this trip in November, upon return from Across the Pond, to spend the holiday season with Emily, including delivering the last of her boxes. It's different than we envisioned, but we're making the best of it. Onward! Day 1: Haines City, Florida to Niceville, Florida, 480 miles After packing up Marina, we headed to Jasper, Florida to our friends the Lacefields' place to pick up our remaining boxes. Roberta had to take her mom to the doctor, but we got to visit with John for a bit. Then back to I-10, crossing into central time zone, and stopping in Niceville for the evening (what a Nice name). Niceville is about 9 miles from Destin, so we took the opportunity to go get some Vitamin Sea in the evening. The beaches weren't very crowded, but folks weren't a...

By Chris We expected to be vagabonding in Sicily and Alicante, Spain right now, but we are instead in Haines City, Florida. Although the destination is different, we are still trying out the vagabond lifestyle. We're living in an AirBnb (what we had intended to do) making do with what's there and what we had anticipated we might need that is in our mini-kitchen and mini-office in the suitcase. So, here's a report on some of the the items we've tried out so far: Travel hangars: Since very few places in Spain or Italy have clothes dryers, we knew that we would be air drying our clothes. So we invested in a set of foldable hangars. Even though we do have a dryer here, we've been using these quite a bit for hanging our shirts to air dry. They are very sturdy and fold up fairly small. Plus, they are really cute colors! Cutting board and knife sharpener: We took the suggestion from another vagabonder to have a cutting board and knife, since these are not usually...